Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Social CRM and Crowd Sourcing

There are many trends hitting large enterprises at the moment right in their bellies. Within the broad sphere of cloud computing, with the adoption of the social Web, one of these trends is crowd sourcing. The business function that is most acutely impacted by this trend is CRM. All the way from marketing to sales to customer support, the social CRM trend is becoming an avalanche, and for some industries the implications bear particularly serious consequences.

To be fair, customers have been chatting in forums and chat rooms for a long time. That’s neither new nor exciting. What is exciting is when Social CRM hits real bottom lines. And nowhere is the opportunity for hard ROI to hit the margin equation so compelling as in Consumer Electronics and Telecom, two industries that are under incessant margin pressure, and bombarded with customer support calls, emails, and chat requests. Each such call is a direct attack on the bottom line.

Tim Hastings, in a ReadWriteWeb article published February 2010, discusses the phenomenon:

Customer Service operations have undergone some heavy changes in the last few years. To save money, many call centers have been moved offshore and self-service Websites allow users to tackle mundane tasks like ordering, paying bills and checking statements.

CrowdEngineering believes that the Social Web is bringing a new wave of disruption to the way customers get help. Their CrowdForce platform is already helping telecommunications companies to crowdsource assistance from distributed online communities and is delivering real value. In one year they raised 100k community members, managed over 500k support requests and reduced support costs by $3M.

Writing on Crowdsourcing.org, Carl Esposti also points to the same company as a thought leader in pioneering the crowdsourced customer service concept. Esposti in fact cites the example of Microsoft, from the consumer electronics world:

Another example is Microsoft, who offered a suite of support options for the Xbox augmenting its web platform support with an online user-to-user chat capability, the option to post questions directly to user forums and another option for real-time Q&A by tweeting official Xbox support representatives @XboxSupport – all from its Xbox Live Platform console.

Just imagine how many customer support calls an Xbox or a Comcast customer support team has to field in a day? From ‘my modem is not working’ to ‘my wireless router is slow’ to ‘my Xbox to TV connection is dropping’ – a wide array of issues comes up constantly. No wonder they are the ones thinking most innovatively about how to reduce the volume!

And yet, for a passionate expert who knows and loves these systems – typically geeky customers – solving these problems is a piece of cake.

As such, there is now a discussion inside major enterprises – largely telecom, consumer electronics, or software companies that service exorbitantly large volume of contact center tickets – that a Level 0 customer support process needs to be introduced before any contact center rep interacts with a customer. And, this Level 0 process would be handled entirely by a crowd sourced set of passionate expert customers.

Needless to say, this new layer of customer service needs to be managed carefully with a well-thought-through incentive structure. It needs to be integrated with the main knowledge management and customer care tracking systems.

But all that, says, Gioacchino La Vecchia, founder and CEO of CrowdEngineering, is possible. “I am confident that CrowdSourced customer service will end up saving millions of dollars in contact center expenses – in-house or outsourced.”

Gartner says:

CrowdEngineering’s approach should interest customer service organizations that are looking for a way to reduce customer service costs. However, the potential is to use CrowdEngineering software to engage customers along other social CRM processes — for example, to co-develop new products or services, or generate brand awareness.

Gartner expects the social CRM market to reach $1.2 billion in revenue by the end of 2012.

This segment is a part in the series : Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing