As mentioned here, I had the opportunity to spend yesterday speaking with the fine folks from the Consortium for Service Innovation about emerging collaborative technologies, primarily in areas of blogging, wikis and social networking. What I expected was a good, conversational session about how collaboration tools could be used to improve customer support. What I didn’t expect was to leave, head spinning with notions, with an entirely different idea on how to address ongoing customer needs over the course of a business relationship. Happily, however, that’s exactly what occurred.
Perhaps a bit of background on the current “state of the art” (::cough::) in customer support is useful to set the stage. Currently, a large number of organizations view customer service and support (that is, interactions with a customer after the initial sale) as a series of “incidents” that need to be “closed.” That is, when a customer has an issue, the customer contacts the organization’s support center, and opens an “incident” (or a “trouble ticket”) that needs to be resolved. This is very transactional, very discrete.
Customer support is also viewed as a cost center by many organizations. This causes support to be measured internally within an organization with an eye toward keeping support investment as low as possible. How to do this? Use the least-expensive resources that can be mustered in order to close the incidents, and close them as quickly as possible.
From the vendor’s perspective, this arrangement makes perfect sense. Support is a cost center. Highly trained development resources are expensive. Many problems can be answered by rote, by Level 1 support (read “inexpensive”) personnel. Therefore, the logical thing to do from the vendor’s perspective is to have incidents come into Level 1 support first and only then, and only if they cannot be resolved, escalated to Level 2 and then, in very rare cases, to Level 3. It’s all very logical, rational and measurable with a stopwatch and a stats counter.
From the customer’s point of view, there’s a gatekeeper who is required to exhaust all (inexpensive, and ineffective) possibilities before escalating the incident to Level 2 or Level 3. If escalated to Level 2, all possibilities must be exhausted before escalating to Level 3. It’s slow. It’s inefficient. It’s maddening from the customer’s perspective.
The big “a-ha” moment for me yesterday with the consortium was their idea of “swarming” around an incident. Instead of going through the rigid, rote routine of support escalation, what if there was a model that looked like this?
swarm to an issue to resolve it, then disband.
Instead of issues (incidents) being pushed through a series of increasingly onerous screens in order to find a solution, what if the solutions were drawn to the issues?
Dave Weinberger nailed the fundamental aspect of this concept back in 2000, per the above, and now the members of the consortium are actually thinking about how to get it done. As important as the “markets are conversations” meme from Cluetrain is, this idea of resource swarming to resolve customer issues is equally important.
Put another way: when an incident occurs, the right people from the social network that forms the community (from inside the company, from the existing customer base, from the broader community of interested parties) will find out about the issue, collaborate using a combination of formal (e.g. FAQs, formal diagnostic processes) and informal (blogs, wikis, Skype, instant messaging) mechanisms, and resolve the issue in a real, human and adhoc manner. The right people come together with their appropriate tools and skills, and they get the job done together, and then disband and reform fluidly for the next incident.
It’s customer support as barn raising. More here.
What if we abolished the support “department?” What if individuals in the organization were encouraged to invest, say, 10%-20% of their time working directly with customers (not unlike what Google does with their engineering staff and Google Labs)?
What if people within the organization subscribed to an RSS feed of incidents, and jumped in and helped when something in their wheelhouse came across their feed reader?
What if dynamic, living profiles were set up, a la Haystack, where people within the organization could tag themselves based on their areas of experience and expertise, and be matched up with incidents that they were best suited to resolve?
1) There are a handful of artists that trigger the music-related functions straight from the Google search bar.
Notice the special area up top above the search results with the picture, etc. This way of entering the Google music area only works for a handful of artists, currently.
2) A little bit of digging actually finds the dedicated the Google Music Search page.
This seems to work for a much larger number of artists.
3) From the music search results page, one can click through to a number of additional resources.
There appear to be a few other functions as well (e.g. “show all tracks“, the Google “musicad” page). Enjoy!
Gartner has published their most recent “Hype Cycle” report, this one covering emerging technologies. The report covers 44 technologies, and prognosticates when they will reach the “plateau of productivity”…that is, mainstream business use and acceptance. Corporate blogging and RSS are flagged as technologies that will take “less than two years” to reach the plateau, with wikis on their tail in the 2-5 year window.
Opinion (mine, not Gartner’s): Of these technologies, RSS is going to be the one that is going to have the greatest challenge slogging through the trough to true mass-market (i.e. not early-adopter) usage. Until there is a truly “zero-training” method of publishing, finding, and subscribing to RSS feeds (which might not even be called RSS feeds in a couple of years), RSS will have a challenge crossing the chasm, to use Geoffrey Moore’s terminology.
At last night’s Hillside Club “Fireside Meeting,” Jerry Michalski presented his thoughts on the question that’s been nagging at him…what is it that caused some of the great thinkers of the past 300 years to become “outcasts?” Why have certain types of outside-the-mainstream thought been marginalized and their proponents ostracized?
Part technology demo, part presentation, part sorta-participative-performance piece, Jerry started out with an overview of what *he’s* been using for the last decade to capture, collect, and organize his thoughts, a piece of visual software called TheBrain. In some ways, The Brain is sort of like del.icio.us on steroids, in that it enables someone in the period of just a few seconds to tag a website, book, piece of music, document or any other “thought” with user-defined tags, index it, and store it for easy future access.
Where TheBrain goes beyond tagging-and-bookmarking tools like del.icio.us, however, is in its ability to create some basic relationships between the different bookmarks (parent, child, peer/sibling, etc.). Although the fundamentals are straightforward, the power of this approach becomes evident when Jerry shows that over the past 10 years he’s logged over 60,000 bookmarks into the system (62,864 as of last night, and counting…), each one connected to a handful of others, creating an ecosystem of links that touches on many of the key areas of human thought.
Disparate thoughts. Disparate ideas, spanning hundreds of years. Yet, Jerry theorizes that there is a common message that each of these thinkers was railing against. That message they opposed?
…to minister to one another.
…to tell the truth about your lives.
…to design the places we inhabit.
The remainer of the evening was wide-open and interactive, with the 40-or-so folks in the room batting around the ideas presented, and finally splitting into emergent groups discussing their various takes on the implications of the discussion.
Misinformation or lack of information, and feeding uncertainty: We don’t trust customers to make good decisions based on good information.
Jerry was recording the evening on his iPod, so when it goes up as a podcast (at Sociate, I’d presume), definitely check it out.
Note to self: Today, make an effort to notice the places where rules, structures, and physical barriers have been put in place based on lack of trust and/or to ostensibly protect me from myself.
Johnnie Moore’s blog rocks, and it’s one of 100+ that I have read through my aggregator in the past. But I rarely read it anymore. Why? Because there’s something better.
What’s better than his blog? Finding the conversations that he’s hosting.
This is because, although his blog is here, he publishes the feed for just his comments. This is where the good stuff is happening. This is where the conversations are happening. (n.b. have shamelessley stolen this idea, and if’n you’re interested the comments feed for The Social Customer Manifesto is here).
Here’s a link to how to do this yourself in Moveable Type or Typepad (thanks, Johnnie for pointing this out). It’s pretty straightforward, but you need to be comfortable mucking with the templates. Drop me a note…or a comment…if you’re not able to get it to work.
As they say, what you see above is a “simulated image” (in this case, what might have been on the napkin before this was created, with kudos to Lee).
My actual experience on the scratchpad site was less-than stellar due to the combination of a troll who chose to scribble out the drawings of others, and the manic sketchings of a wanna-be Larry Flynt. The current scratchpad area appears to be a completely unmoderated, anonymous area. Not suitable for those with an aversion to profanity, etc. You’ve been warned; here’s the link. But, despite the presence of the troglodytes on the site, the possibilities are impressive.
To interact with the scratchpad, there was no loading of anything needed. No installations. No registration. No training. No nothing…just show up, and start collaborating.
The second site, also by the same author, was a collaborative site where one can move the virtual equivalent of alphabetic refrigerator magnets around. Again, no setup was needed; by simply showing up at the site, you are immediately immersed in the environment and collaborating with the others who are there. The same caveats apply as above, here’s the refrigerator magnet link.
The thing that makes these sites revolutionary in my opinion is their ease of use and light-weight nature. The scratchpad site appears to be a 29K shockwave file, and allows up to fifty concurrent participants. Similar specs on the letter game.
What if an organization could point a website visitor at a private site like this and work with that customer or prospect on architecting a solution to their problems, collaboratively and in real time? Or what if you could integrate these capabilities into, say, a wiki-based environment, and document and take snapshots of a solution as it evolves?
Google is doing it with Gmail…putting a “limit” in place that, in actuality, isn’t much of a limit at all (2GB is a fair amount of email to store). But it feels like one. Ditto with the ability to “get” an “invitation only” Gmail account.
Hugh is doing it, and creating a microtulipmania in the process. He’s producing just 200 of each of his cartoons as t-shirts, and only having four designs available at a time. The interesting thing is, he’s got a huge backcatalog of designs to pull from. So, as long as he is making them available, there will always be a few hundred shirts available, as new designs could be rolled in to replace the old ones that have gone “out of print.” It feels like one needs to act “right away” in order to get a shirt, even though it’s quite possible that there will always be some available.
Among a number of interesting dimensions of this “artificial scarcity” is the emergence of secondary markets that are completely irrational. When Gmail first launched, the “undersupply” of Gmail invitiations caused a rich secondary market to spring up on eBay, with people selling Gmail invites at, well, an infinite profit.
One: If you are the creator of something, and you have the discipline to not need to wring every short-term cent out of something you’re doing, the resulting buzz based on the scarcity comes back to you, in spades.
Two: This thinking may help to build relationships and (perhaps) community as well. If there are only a “few” of something available, connecting with others who share that thing can be a starting point for a relationship. This applies to both members of the community, as well as to between the creator of the “thing” and the community members themselves.
Three: This kind of scarcity creates a huge opportunity for arbitrageurs in a secondary market.
If the above three points are valid, the relationship-driven folks live in worlds One and Two, and the pure profit-maximization folks live in world Three. All three worlds are valid. Understand which world you’re in. And why.
This week’s desktop search frenzy is much bigger than the desktop. It actually signals the beginning of a fundamental shift in the way we will interact with information.
Many of us want to keep things “organized.” We want to put the right files in the right folders so we’ll be able to find them later. We want to organize our vacation photos. We want to organize our music (sometimes autobiographically). We want to put our desktop things on our Desktop, and our documents in the Documents folder. The folder itself provides the metadata that, in theory, helps us to effectively locate what we’re looking for when we need it later.
We think this way because the tools that we were given to store and locate information were based on the metaphor of a set of hierarchical folders. It’s the script we’ve been given.
Distributed creation of content, however, broke this. When millions of people are creating content (whether in the form of web pages, blogs, or what have you), only a miniscule fraction of those people will go through the laborious step of explicitly stating how that information should be organized. The DMOZ, for example, states categorization of approximately four million web sites — while Google lists over eight billion pages (yes, one is counting “sites,” the other is counting “pages,” but there’s still a three-order-of-magnitude difference here…work with me). Organizing things is a pain. Let’s not forget that Yahoo! started out as a directory which, although it still exists, has been depreciated and now only fills a minor role in the Y! universe.
When things got too massive, messy, and organic for the folder approach, search stepped in to fill the gap.
Until the desktop search tools started showing up, there was always an implicit distinction between things that were “local” and things that were “on the web,” one primary difference being in how you located those things when you needed them. That difference has effectively vanished. And with that change, I would contend the Folder’s days are numbered.
It is only a matter of time before the “flatness” of the web becomes mirrored in how people use their local systems, and maybe even in how those systems are organized. With a solid desktop search engine, why should I bother to put things in folders anymore? I can put everything in one place, and the search engine will find it for me. My job just got easier.
I no longer think of my machine as a separate entity from the Internet. It just happens to be the nearest node.
Of course, this only works well for things that are easily indexable. The images that are fairly flying from camera phones will still need to be indexed, as will the podcasts and the videos and all the other “rich media” out there. That is, until someone figures out a cost-effective way to automatically extract and index metadata from these types or artifacts*. (Hey Virage, are you listening?) I suppose in a way, Google’s library project today is an extension of this as well — a library itself is rich media, isn’t it?