Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 4)

Sramana: OK. Fair enough. Crowd sourced customer support, technical support, this is something that we are seeing elsewhere as well. You know, in the program that I run, One Million by One Million, which is a virtual incubator, we have an Italian company called Crowd Engineering that is selling, both in Europe and the U.S., to enterprise customers and providing what they call a level 0 customer support. Before level 1 or level 2 customer support touches a consumer query, the issue could potentially be solved by crowd sourcing customer support through expert customers. That’s the platform that they’re providing. It’s something that is becoming more prevalent, yes?

Markos: I think it’s becoming more prevalent, but the crowd source community support on its own is quite good, but only goes halfway there.

Sramana: What Crowd Engineering is doing is logging every single crowd sourcing request as a regular customer support request, and then that goes into the system and, at the right point, it’s escalated and dives into the knowledge base and everything.

Markos: OK. Sounds good, yes.

Sramana: It sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing on the IT side as well.

Markos: Yes, basically, it’s very similar.

Sramana: You said that in the collaboration that you are facilitating within the IT department, you now have people across different silos who are collaborating and discussing, and you provide collaborating environments, including storage and saving of those environments. Can you talk a bit more about what’s in these environments, what kinds of cutting edge technologies are you using in these environments?

Markos: Effectively, it would look more like a discussion that you would expect. We talk about rich media in there, so looking at images, documents, sharing videos and a lot of text communication as well. You push up to the work space, documents  of a sort, and discuss them. It’s a bit like a social media wall. Everything is stamped. You can see the conversations going on like that.

Sramana: Is it an instant messaging kind of environment?

Markos: It’s similar to that, the key to it being that it’s part of the overall workflow for dealing with something within IT. So, launching a collaboration session would be part of the workflow for ruling out a new service or upgrading a server or dealing with a major incident or opening a new facility. Whatever those things happened to be that IT was dealing with, they’ve got a collaboration session that dealt with it. I wouldn’t necessarily call it groundbreaking technology. It is social technology. It’s sharing information in a visual way, and then that record itself is stored as part of the overall workflow and saved in the system. So, it’s searchable as well. It’s key that with any of these types of technology that you can search for things in the database in the future.

Sramana: At the heart of it, is it an instant messenger session that is being stored in a searchable database?

Markos: It’s a bit like that. If you can imagine, you login to the system, or you’re notified that you’ve been linked to one of these sessions. When you login, there’s a little bubble there around your window that says, oh, there’s two sessions here that have updates. When you click on it, you see the activity stream of what’s going on, and then you can contribute to that. You can also be notified on your mobile device and contribute from there. So, yes, it is much like some of the things that we see on the consumer side, but now, embedded within the IT management system itself.

Sramana: What are you seeing in terms of adoption of these social capabilities in the customers?

Markos: I think that with anything like this, it tends to be the 10% of customers who are ahead of the curve are asking for it, using it … and things like that. Most of the things that we bring out are cutting edge. There’s always around 10% of customers who run with it, and then there’s about another 30% or 40% who are trying it, and then the other half are saying, we’re not ready for it yet. That’s about the proportions that we’re looking at.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems
1 2 3 4 5