Area of Opportunity: How might we harness the collective intelligence to offload technical support ( LoB level) to the crowd, while still retaining quality and knowledge of the performance defining areas inside SoftCorp ?
Coarse Narrative: collection of key interactions •
Use the Elance engine ( filter for talent quality, management of talent - rating, reputation etc.) with a bidding engine, real-time analytics and micropayments to create a collective intelligence technical helpdesk - working globally, acting locally 24/x7
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Anyone, anywhere can answer a technical question, graded for degree of difficulty, like recipes. High difficulty problems are retained by SoftCorp.
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Bid's are allocated by a geographically aware bidding engine on altruistic principles - keeping the customer’s geography as a reference, bids are bundled based on the customer’s time zone +|- 2 time zones to enable email or live conversation. In absence of quality talent in the geography, the engine looks up talent in inverted time zones - e.g. Bangalore and California to allow time-interlocked email conversations. Finally it dismantles geography and finds the best talent worldwide, and lets the talent decide to engage or not.
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Simplified TOEFL tests as a entry barrier ensure a common language and daisy chaining of responses
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Bidding is altruistic : Not only do the most experienced respondents get a priority, periodically completely new respondents are given a chance based on their entry scores, creating a virtuous cycle.
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Locking a bid is necessary before a response can be created. 2nd and 3rd bids are preserved.
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Consumer feedback (satisfied, number of stars etc.) along with performance metrics - for example - response time, content richness determine closure of message. If the response is reopened by the consumer more than 3 times, the first bidder is de-allocated and the second bidder is engaged.
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This time the number of tries is reduced to 2 for the #2 to ensure faster resolution. For #3 its down to 1 response. Naturally, the reputation score is inversely proportional to the number of tries.
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Message closure leads to instant analytics and micro-payment to the respondents account, along with a scorecard showing the before & after effect on his | her key metrics.