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/

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.

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/

“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

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.

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.