Crowdsource support CoPs
I’ve written in the past of a support team using CoP tools to ask questions (forums), share tips (blogs), list workarounds to processes (wikis)…in all everyone can learn off each other.
Now what about the customer?
Traditional designed Support Database
1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would log a call to the support database.
2. A support person takes the call.
3. All discussion and questions (trouble shooting, investigation) are done via email
- with other support people
- with the customer
4. Other support people don’t go along for the ride in other people’s calls
5. Call is closed and customer problem is solved.
6. Other support people do not benefit from this (as it’s not documented in a public online space)
7. Other customers do not benefit from this (as it’s not documented in a public online space)
Combination of Support Database and an Online space (CoP)
1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would log a call to the support database.
2. A support person takes the call.
3. The discussion happens in the CoP forums where it passes everyone’s radar (as our support database doesn’t have conversations around an item, so we jump to another application and use our CoP forums)
4. Therefore everyone is along for the ride (learning as part of work at no extra effort at all)
5. Call is closed
6. Other support people do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)
7. Other customers do not benefit from this
Crowdsource the helpdesk
Samuel Driessen has a post called, Crowdsourcing the IT desk, which takes this one step further so both parties can share and learn.
We are web friends and I know he won’t mind so I’ll re-post most of it here:
“What I was wondering is: How many companies are crowdsourcing their IT helpdesks? I see most companies still maintaining traditional helpdesks. So, every employees knows the numbers he/she should call, you call the helpdesk and they try to help you. Usually there’s also a system to support that process. This tool supports the helpdesk to manage calls and their solutions. And employees can check the progress of their incident/question.
However, we all know lots of stuff that is IT helpdesk-ish is solved by asking colleagues for help or Googling the solution. And the solutions the helpdesk provides to one colleagues is shared among the helpdesk people, but is not shared with all employees.
Would it be nice and wise to crowdsource the IT helpdesk. I’m not saying the helpdesk employees should move over. We still need them. But their knowledge and that of all the employees can be used to quickly find who else has a certain problem, to solve issues the IT helpdesk can’t solve, etc.
I’m wondering: does your corporate IT helpdesk work in this way? Or do you know of companies that have this in place? And is this working for them?”
This is how the scenario would work
1. An internal customer of one of our applications eg. a design tool would visit our online support CoP and post a forum topic
2. Anyone in the organisation can visit the forum and see this call (this type of community wouldn’t require members)
- anyone in the organisation can get an RSS or email subscription to this forum
3. The discussion happens in the CoP forums where it passes everyone’s radar (by everyone we don’t just mean the support team, we mean the whole organisation)
4. Therefore everyone (the whole organisation) can choose to go along for the ride (learning as part of work at no extra effort at all)
5. Call may be solved by a non-support person, but it has to be officially closed by a support person.
6. Other support people do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)
7. Other customers do benefit from this along the way and also post-call (we may blog about the context of an important call, and even provide a solution in the wiki)
Problem now is we have replaced all the sophistication of managing support calls using a designed support database, with a simple forum in a CoP. Now we can crowdsource and re-use information, but we lack workflow tools to manage and report calls.
This is the problem I had with a facilitator with one of our internal CoPs he’s using for support.
I told him these free-form tools are great as they allow you to bend them to do what you want, but you eventually hit a wall as they are not designed to do exactly what you want. You can’t have your cake an eat it to. On the other hand a specifically designed tool will be rigid and only do one thing.
An ideal situation is to go with the crowdsourcing forum concept, where it’s a little more designed towards support flows.
eg. Get Satisfaction, UserVoice and others
I mentioned the business could buy a similar enterprise tool to those above, or they may say we have generic CoPs, please bend them as much as possible to suit your needs, as we can’t buy specific tools for 100’s of departments.
But there’s more…
Another aspect is that there may need to be parallel support spaces.
At work I run Communities of Practice (CoPs) and have a support CoP for Facilitators that run their own CoPs.
When they have an issue they raise a forum topic, if they (or myself) have something to share we use a group blog.
Sometimes a facilitator of a CoP will answer the forum question…yeah, they do my support responsibility for free.
But sometimes we will go back and forth in the forums to clarify the question, and it may get too irrelevant (noisy) for others on the forum.
So we start emailing
- I’d rather another solution where you can splinter off the forum into a private customer side discussion
- this way it’s documented, and I can point other support people to this side discussion, rather than send them a load of emails of my current discussion with the customer
Also, I may need to talk to some other support people in private away from the customer
- rather than email we do this in a private support forum in our Administration CoP
- but again, what would be ideal is to splinter off the forum into a private discussion with my other support people (rather than the two parallel CoP approach)
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
Thanks for extending the conversation and pointing back to your earlier posts on this topic!
Comment by Samuel Driessen — August 5, 2009 @ 10:36 am
Nice post, John. After reading it earlier today the last part of your post kept me thinking. I understand the issue you’re describing. W.r.t. a solution: is something like you can do in Friendfeed what you are looking for? In FF you can take a post and share it with a group or person, publicly and privately.
Comment by Samuel Driessen — August 5, 2009 @ 12:51 pm
Brilliant Samuel.
The solution is that traditional support databases become more web 2.0, this way we still have the sophistication of managing calls and reporting, but also the openness of crowdsourcing.
I think UserVoice and Get Satisfaction are a good start.
But yes, when I need to speak to the customer in private or speak to the support staff about a current call, I don’t want to use email, I want to still be able to do this within the support database.
So your example of friendfeed allowing you to share an item with a group is a winning feature, as I’m not having to switch applications. And speaking to the customer in private without switching applications is also great (but I wonder how private this is, as I would like to invite other support people to see the conversation I’m having with the customer).
I think each call in a support database should have the main stream and 2 sub-streams, all in the one view.
This way when a support person looks at the call, on their screen they can see the main discussion, they can also see the admin/support discussion, and also see a private discussion with the customer.
The customer would only see 2 streams (main and private).
The general user would only see the main stream.
Comment by John Tropea — August 6, 2009 @ 1:23 am
Added to my comment above is what if an issue is too hard to solve and needs some development work. We would need to mark this status, which posts the call over to a dev team, ie a trigger that transfers the call to their support application.
Often as customer support people we can see that status of a call is with the dev team, but we don’t know the updates of it’s progression as it’s happening in another database.
So again whether these need to be the same application or some kind of interaction ID, where you click a link in the customer support database and it takes you to that same call in the dev team database.
Comment by John Tropea — August 6, 2009 @ 1:36 am
From the Read Write Web blog:
“Customer service reps, it’s your lucky day. It just so happens that three of the top Web-based support applications — ticketing system Zendesk, issue tracker JIRA, and customer service platform Get Satisfaction — are now integrated.”
http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/07/zendesk-jira-and-getsatisfaction-a-support-mashup.php
Comment by John Tropea — August 6, 2009 @ 5:35 am
Larry Hawes has a post on hybrid use of both process-centric and people-centrict tools.
The BPM type tool to locate issue, status, who’s on it, blended together with conversational tools where the troubleshooting actually happens.
http://lehawes.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/the-nexus-of-defined-business-process-and-ad-hoc-collaboration/
Comment by John Tropea — August 6, 2009 @ 8:57 am
Finally got around to reading this post, as I had promised to do. Nice work, John, especially in detailing the different use cases for IT help support.
I like the notion of crowdsourced IT help very much. In fact, this was an informal practice at IBM, where I worked until last November. A good handful of employees were early adopters of BlueTwit, an internal microsharing (i.e. Twitter) tool that was not officially supported by IBM at the time. One way we used BlueTwit was to help each other out with difficulties around other applications, both IBM sanctioned ones and other unsupported, experimental apps. A common questions was something like “Is Sametime down? I can’t login?”
My experience with using BlueTwit and fellow IBMers as crowdsourced IT support was great. In fact, it was generally superior to calling the IBM Help Desk in terms of both quality and speed of issue resolution.
I also frequently see Mac users (myself included) turning to Apple Support forums for answers, again because they get better answers faster than the Apple KnowledgeBase store of “official” support documents can provide.
Comment by Larry Hawes — August 13, 2009 @ 2:23 pm
Brilliant comment. I really like the example of apple users forums, the wisdom of the diverse crowd can scale more than the experts. Of course they don’t have obligation, but at least you get lots of eyes on it by experienced people, and quick response.
It’s a sign of the times that the users together can disintermediate an expert official support forms
Again a forum is a shared space on a topic, and only one crowdsourcing example for support.
You also talk about enterprise-wide support by posting in micro-messaging systems…people that follow you or see your post in the public stream may offer assistance. This is different than shifting context from one forum to the next.
I posted a while back on this in the workplace
http://libraryclips.blogsome.com/2008/08/22/140-characters-to-knowledge-share/
Comment by John Tropea — August 14, 2009 @ 1:09 am