Monday, October 22, 2007

Satisfaction: Crowdsourcing Customer Support


Imagine customers tapping the social function of the web to create their own company-specific communities --- a PR nightmare or PR opportunity?

That’s a question Facebook had to recently address when several of its users enlisted a new company called Satisfaction (see their blog) to discuss issues they had with the networking site.

The focus of Satisfaction is customer service. According to Satisfaction, they are a “people-powered customer service for absolutely everything. More specifically, though, it's a place where communities of customers come together to answer each others questions, share ideas with each other or with an organization, report and solve problems and generally talk about what matters to them around these products or services.”

As Tim O’Reilly pointed out: “What we found compelling about Satisfaction was their use of collective intelligence to redefine the relationship between a company and its customers.”

Company sponsored forums where customers can talk and help each other is not new; more and more businesses are creating them to help customers, build loyalty and deflect expensive calls to support centers. But Satisfaction’s communities meet a need for customers of companies who lack forums or want an alternative. It makes it easy for customers to set up and interact with one another within a neutral environment.

Satisfaction taps the power of crowdsourcing to give customers a collective voice. For the uninitiated, crowdsourcing involves engaging a large, undefined group of people to develop a product, solve a problem or refine a process.

A growing list of companies have bought into the idea and now employees at such companies as Google and Timbuk2 are becoming members. Thor Muller, Satisfaction's CEO and co-founder estimates that about 40 percent of Satisfaction's communities include representation from the companies being discussed.

From a PR perspective, a Satisfaction community gives companies an alternative channel to reach and converse with their customers. Ideally, companies should not have to wait for a Satisfaction community to appear. They should already be creating social networks for their customers to address service issues, announce products and solicit customer feedback. But ignoring a Satisfaction community is not only a lost opportunity to increase customer loyalty, it potentially blemishes a reputation and could threaten future sales.

Satisfaction has made the job of creating social networks easier, and companies should determine how this new twist on crowdsourcing meets their customer support needs. It will be interesting to see if Satisfactions's strategy is scalable and will be able to handle an influx of participants. While crowdsourcing is a compelling complement to an existing support structure, I would not advise companies to rely solely on crowdsourcing. Businesses come and go but continuity is critical to customer relations. Company run forums help ensure a constant dialogue with customers.

While I can't predict Satisfaction's future, using crowdsourcing as a customer support tool will force companies to assess their customer service strategy. It is yet another example of how, in an era of social media, the name of the game may not be control but the ability to adapt to new technologies. Perhaps the benefit for companies is not in how they control social networks, but how they choose to embrace them.

Later this week I will post an interview I recently did with Thor Muller.

Let me get back to you.

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Posted by Dan Greenfield at 16:19:58 | Permanent Link | Comments (0) |

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Crowdsourcing

In Grayson Daughters' comments on my last posting about Podcamp Atlanta, she suggested I expound upon my questions I raised regarding new and old journalism.  I was noting the differences between traditional news coverage from that day and the postings of several bloggers who attended the unconference.  I asked which gave you a better sense of PodCamp Atlanta?  Which would you rather read? Is user generated content less newsworthy?

No surprises that the AP story carried more authority and more useful information for the general reader, but it certainly wasn’t personal.  The writer’s voice was not to be found, unlike the bloggers who shared many a personal feeling – some of which had nothing to do with podcasting.  In general, reporters generally stick to their assignment and are forbidden or strongly discouraged from expressing their own views as it undermines their “objectivity.”

Clearly, bloggers and reporters each have a role to play in recording the news.  Is one better, tough to say, but perhaps we need not be so binary.  The roles of reporters and citizen journalists are beginning to morph, despite the distrust and even disdain that some have for the other.  It’s also getting more common for reporters to blog.  But now, according to story by New York Times reporter Nicolas Carr a new experiment is afoot to broaden the traditional network of reporters and their sources to include readers and their sources.   It’s an example “crowdsourcing,” typically where the work of employees is outsourced to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the Internet for little or no money.

To learn more, I went to Assignment Zero.  This site as Nicolas Carr points out is a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, which was established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University.  As Jay Rosen writes:"The investigation takes place in the open, not behind newsroom walls. Participation is voluntary; contributors are welcomed from across the Web. The people getting, telling and vetting the story are a mix of professional journalists and members of the public -- also known as citizen journalists. This is a model I describe as 'pro-am.'"

I don’t think White House reporters and war correspondents have to worry about losing their jobs – at least not yet – but crowdsourcing can potentially change the news dynamic for the PR profession.

While technology and new media increasingly play an important role in what we do, I still rely on an old fashioned network of reporters to do my job, and I like to believe that they need us; you could say that relationship building is critical to our mutual success.  Nonetheless, reporters are still gate keepers to the public, and we don’t always like their results.  We have all experienced the negative story or no mention at all despite our best efforts. 

With new media, our circle of contacts and gatekeepers has now been expanded, and the results may be even less predictable.  With crowdsourcing, journalism is becoming much more collaborative, more egalitarian. PR professionals will face the challenge of participating more, but perhaps influencing less as a wider group writes the story. I only hope that the sponsoring news organizations will uphold the same standards for accuracy and fairness.

In time, readers may not recognize the newspapers of today.  They will appear quaint or even stilted as a more informal style becomes more accepted.  Most readers under 30 would rather quickly scan through a Wikipedia entry than thumb through a dusty volume of Encyclopedia Britannica. 

If this is successful, crowdsourcing may lessen the need for professional reporters.  But I am not going to throw stones from any glass houses.  For if journalism can embrace “amateurs” to write the news, there is no reason to believe that clients won't seek amateurs to pitch it. 

Let me get back to you. 

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Posted by Dan Greenfield at 10:18:40 | Permanent Link | Comments (3) |