Smart companies are fast discovering that the quickest path to a robust support knowledge base is to bring the crowd—social customers and their conversations—into the fold. They’re creating and promoting online support communities, solving more problems faster, and enjoying stunning returns. Knowledge management is among the most valuable things the crowd can do—and it does it very, very well. Find out how top brands like HP and Lenovo are saving tens of millions by tapping the crowd for product knowledge and solutions—and scaling their support functions by many fold in the process.

1. from crowdsourcing to
knowledge management

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contents
1 crowdsourcing—what is it?
2 the impact of crowdsourcing
3 where do online communities come in?
4 knowledge management in a nutshell
5 crowdsourcing knowledge management
7 conclusion
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crowdsourcing—
what is it?
How do companies like Autodesk save millions annually by Crowdsourcing is a business revolution so powerful it’s
tapping their customers for ideas and solutions? How do changing everything about the way we do business. It turns
companies like giffgaff shake up the UK telecom market with out that the power of a distributed network (again, your social
a handful of employees? customers) is so immense, its capability to produce value
literally dwarfs anything we could possibly do through our
By tapping the power of the crowd. Smart companies
internal teams. Crowdsourcing is leveraging the power of the
like Autodesk, giffgaff and many others use social software
many to achieve what was once relegated to a few specialists.
to create virtual crowds around shared product interests
It’s a new and hugely efficient mechanism for matching talent
and brand passion. They build online communities of
and knowledge with those who need it—a novel opportunity
passionate social customers and tap them for service,
for businesses to realize off-the-chart scale. Using the
knowledge and ideas.
power of the crowd, smart businesses grow their service and
The Internet distributes knowledge faster and more widely support teams exponentially, deepen their knowledge bases
than anything we’ve seen. The way it works shows us that by many-fold, and rapidly accelerate innovation by looking at
humans don’t always behave in predictable self-interested thousands of ideas instead of several.
patterns. It throws our deeply social nature into bold relief
and reveals our strong desire to collaborate. The crowd is
quick to contribute, jumps at opportunities to cultivate talent the spectacular scale
and loves passing knowledge on to others. The crowd has
of crowdsourcing
way more than just wisdom. It has talent, creativity, and it’s
HP Customer Experts handle
amazingly productive.
20% of customer care
across 200 countries and 7 languages.
Crowdsourcing is when a company takes a job that was once
performed by employees and outsources it to the crowd. It’s 30 Lenovo Superfans have
letting a self-organized community of amateurs (your social created 44% of
Accepted Solutions.
customers) design new products, support other customers,
solve problems and find new ways to share their passion for The 02 community generated
the things they use every day—your products.
900 customer ideas
in 6 months.
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the impact of
crowdsourcing
The impact of crowdsourcing (as with all transformative When conditions are right, the crowd will almost always out
innovations) is not the new technology it brings, but the perform any number of employees. Because the right person
human behavior it propagates. With so many new chances to for the job is not always who we expect, labor is often better
excel at more than one creative endeavor, we’re turning into organized through community than organizational hierarchy.
veritable fountainheads of knowledge and experience. The Further, peer evaluation almost always surfaces the best
Internet makes it easy to publish. Social technologies make ideas the fastest, and peer evaluation is also best facilitated
it easy to share. The resulting explosion of user-generated- through community.
content (UCG)—real , authentic voices of shared experience—
Crowdsourcing gives us access to a far greater range of talent
has indelibly changed our economy.
and creativity than could possibly exist in our own workforce.
Because crowdsourcing is triggering a tectonic shift in And it more than just surfaces talent, it cultivates and
the way we organize work, apply talent, conduct research, nurtures talent, enriching everyone’s experience.
and make and market our products, it’s putting enormous
pressure on business to make dramatic changes. It’s forcing
us to approach our customers as potential partners—a
cultural leap many organizations are proving ill-equipped to
take. But from the customer point of view, it’s an opportunity
for a much more interesting and exciting relationship
with the brands they love. They want to participate more
meaningfully in the process of product design and creation,
more meaningfully in their customer experiences. Now that
they can, there’s no going back.
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where do online
communities
come in?
Communities are groups in the crowd who come together But it’s important to remember that approaching an online
around ideas. They’re collections of like-minded enthusiasts, community as a form of cheap labor can often backfire.
places where amateurs self-organize around shared In order to reap the full benefits of an online customer
interests. Today it’s very easy for communities to live online community, companies must both demonstrate a deep
where they can reach thousands if not millions of people. commitment and let the community feel a sense of ownership
But amazing reach is just one important quality of online over its own creations. Today’s bottom line is that people
communities. More valuable is their authenticity, spirit and don’t want to be passive consumers. The more opportunity
passion—something no business can fabricate. they have to participate in the design of their customer
experiences—from shopping to product use to service—the
And online communities are phenomenally productive.
more spirit and passion they invest, and the more vibrant and
When businesses develop online communities as a context
useful their communities become.
for work to take place, amazing things happen. Customers
engage each other in meaningful conversation, they get
their questions answered and problems solved, they share
and iterate on ideas for better products. What once took
a bureaucratic hierarchy, can now be done with an active,
vibrant online community.
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knowledge
management in
a nutshell
Knowledge Bases (KBs) for technical support and call
centers first emerged in the 1990s in order to increase call
center agent productivity. Traditionally, the process involved
assigning employees with the task of compiling incoming
cases to the call center, organizing them, creating content
around the issues they raise, and then publishing that content Knowledge management is the process of
back to the agents. codifying support cases—putting them into
a digestible, widely consumable format.
When it comes to customer care, those who have invested
in codifying their support cases—made the knowledge
they contain more digestible and findable—have realized business impact of knowledge management
tremendous bottom-line gains. Operationally, the business
handles more incidents over time, reduces issue reopen ↑ increased incidents handled/time and /channel
rates, invests less in training and realizes significant ↑ increased first contact resolution rates
decreases in cost per interaction. From a market perspective,
↓ decreased issue reopen rates
their customers experience reduced hold times, faster
resolution times and report higher satisfaction rates. ↓ decreased training days per year
↓ decreased cost per interaction
Although the traditional process of knowledge management
does have measurable benefits, by today’s standards, it’s ↓ decreased assisted service deflection rate
cumbersome, expensive and slow. By the time codified ↑ increased self-service success rate
knowledge is back in the hands of the agents, the opportunity
to use it for case resolution could well be gone. And as the
pace of innovation continues to accelerate, the time-value customer experience impact of knowledge management
of knowledge becomes even more significant. The quicker
we fold real-world use-case feedback into our business, the ↓ reduced hold time
more competitive advantage we’ll have. ↓ reduced abandonment rate
↑ increased satisfaction with incident
↑ increased satisfaction with overall support
↓ decreased time to resolution
↑ better customer experiences
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crowdsourcing
knowledge
management
The Crowd Knows Best Social Puts the Crowd on Steriods
Knowledge creation, cataloging and curation are among the Social applications—customer forums, blogs, groups, Q&As—
most valuable things the crowd can do—and it does them have now fully revolutionized the process of knowledge
very, very well. Consider Wikipedia: 4.5 million articles to date management. No longer do we have to gather support cases,
and still growing. Because the crowd is fast, efficient and organize them, create content around them and publish that
effective, it makes information (knowledge) more valuable. content. With the right technology, our social customers can
do it for us.
Not only is the crowd a perfect resource for creating support
knowledge around our products, they provide a unique The proliferation of social platforms and technologies have
vantage point we can’t create from inside the business. There put an enormous amount of crowdsourced knowledge across
are entire classes of problems that only customers can the social web. Smart companies are fast discovering that the
answer. They live in interconnected world, hooking products quickest path to a robust support knowledge base is to bring
together from multiple vendors and using them under social customers and their conversations into the fold. They
complex scenarios we couldn’t possibly have imagined before create and promote online support communities, incentive
product release. They are out there unraveling problems and reward customer contributions, make more information
and finding new solutions—creating new knowledge—every available to more people, solve more problems faster and
day. Our customers are more knowledgeable about our enjoy stunning returns.
products that we can ever be. And because knowledge they
create is more current, it tends to be more accurate. When
our customers get their problems solved the first time with
accurate information, they are more satisfied.
case in point: HP
500 million community posts have
$
$
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solved 50% of issues $
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$
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across 40 million customers $
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$
$
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saving HP $50
million
$
$
$
$ $
$
$
$
in support costs since 2009. $
$
$
$
$
5
$
$
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Smart companies are corralling social customer By letting their social customers drive as much of the
conversations from across the web and steering them onto knowledge management process as they can from end-to-
their own domain where they can: end—letting their social customer identify what’s important
for others to know and decide what to teach—forward
1. capture and manage content.
thinking companies are bringing social customers into the
More accurately, capture and let their customers manage
fold and letting them assume a new role in the company.
content. Businesses are finding that the more control they
give up over their support knowledge, the better. Using a
combination of system intelligence (recognizing content
value by the number of views it gets, how often it comes up
in searches) with customer intelligence (kudos, ratings and
reviews, knowledge base nominations), smart business are
building both a bullet train to big savings and a more engaged
and committed audience.
case in point: Lenovo
2. provide more engaging social customer experiences.
1200 community produced
Your customers are already out there talking about their
knowledge articles provide
44%
experiences with your products—without prompting,
of customer support.
without feedback, without reward. Incentivizing the process
of knowledge management—rewarding folks for content
creation and curation—gets more people involved and gets
them to step up their level of contribution. In an owned online
community, using the principles of gamification, talent is
recognized and rewarded with greater status and privilege.
Customers have more engaging social customer experiences
and they contribute even more.
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conclusion
Moving forward, we can expect knowledge management The phenomenon of crowdsourcing teaches us that
processes to become even more collaborative. Community humans have enormous hidden talents and a deep desire to
members will weigh in on the taxonomy and evolve the entire collaborate. When they come together around their shared
community experience. We can expect social technologies passions, they do amazing things. All a business need do,
to get smarter and better, giving more customers access to is create a supportive, motivating environment (an online
more dynamic content in real-time. We can expect content support community), encourage its customers to contribute,
generation to become more specialized as communities and then tap the enormous content they produce for service,
surface folks good at writing, others who are great at tagging, knowledge and ideas. When they do, they come away with 2
still others who are a wizard at making good content more significant benefits: scaled service at low cost, and a deeply
searchable. All this will serve to make knowledge bases both engaged audience.
more useful and easier to use.
Lithium social software helps the world’s most iconic brands to build brand nations—vibrant online communities of passionate social customers.
Lithium helps top brands such as AT&T, Sephora, Univision, and PayPal build active online communities that turn customer passion into social media
marketing ROI. For more information on how to create lasting competitive advantage with the social customer experience,
visit lithium.com, or connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and our own brand nation – the Lithosphere.
lithium.com | © 2012 Lithium Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved
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