Crowdsourcing Customer Service

Providing greaCrowdsourcing Customer Service - Sharyn Munro Virtual Assistancet customer service can be very time consuming and quite costly. If you have a large, engaged and tech savvy customer base, you might want to include crowdsourcing your customer service as part of your strategy.  It’s a strategy used by many high profile companies such as Telstra, Facebook and FitBit.

While you may think that your business isn’t large enough to harness this type of support there are many ways you can involve your customers in your customer service.

Product Reviews: Your existing customers can provide product reviews and “how I used it…” details on your products and services. This helps people who are looking to make a decision about your business to see how it’s being used and what customers like and dislike. You can also set it up so that potential customers can ask questions of reviewers.  You’d need to keep an eye on these and respond to any that remain unanswered for any length of time, but chances are the reviewer would be happy to enter into a conversation with someone else.  You could also encourage customers to engage by offering vouchers or gifts for reviews marked as helpful or for sales from people who’ve engaged with their reviews.  Even gamification could be used to promote users who offer good advice on a regular basis using badges or “expert” titles.

Helpdesk services: Customers who use your products and services can also participate in a forum where they answer questions about your product and provide helpdesk services for other customers. You’ll often find that issues that occur for one person will also be an issue for others.  Plus people who find shortcuts or unusual uses for products love to share their knowledge with others who appreciate the knowledge.  As with reviews, the use of gamification or rewards for successful posts can encourage participation.

Empowering your customers with the ability to share knowledge and experience and to give potential clients the ability to ask questions of actual users of your products and services increases the engagement with your business, helps eliminate waiting time for clients with queries and gives your staff a break from having to be available 24/7.  It’s always worth your while to have staff monitoring enquiries to help handle any serious complaints or issues or to flag with appropriate staff members any issues that need to be escalated beyond the crowdsourcing platform.  What you won’t need however is a large number of customer service staff being available to answer queries on online platforms.

Crowdsourcing customer service might not be the answer for every business, but if you’ve got a loyal customer base that are vocal advocates on social media, then it just might be something worth considering for your business.