Emergence Marketing had an interesting post yesterday by Francois Gossieaux on crowd sourcing and community-based customer service. At its most basic level, we see the difference as follows:

- Crowd Sourcing Customer Service relies on customers to answer each other’s questions. For the most part, agents need not get involved.

- Community-Based Customer Service has agents and other experts participating alongside customer’s own efforts to answer each other's questions and make sure the best possible service is being delivered. Ideally, the community software platform supports this hybrid approach with specific business process automation.

Either problem hopes to enable customers to solve problems themselves and amongst each other before engaging an agent.

As Francois points out, the pure crowd sourcing model is a very difficult and risky method unless you have a really big community, like Microsoft. With an average or small community, it’s a lot harder to ensure the quality of the interactions without the aid of company expert participation. A community that has too few active practitioners could be delivering inaccurate content, content that goes stale over time without being updated, or even no answers at all as questions are asked.

The reason this problem is so much worse for smaller communities is due to the so-called “Rule of 10s," a common rule for predicting community engagement. It states that if you have 100 community members, 1 will create a new thread, 10 will comment on the thread, and the rest will just watch. Let’s turn the numbers around. Suppose a relatively small service organization has 40 agents. They decide to deploy 20 of these agents answering questions in the community. (By the way, the agents will have time to participate, because answering questions in the community will dramatically reduce the number of cases that have to be handled.) Given the Rule of 10s, 20 agents becomes the equivalent of 20*10, or 200 additional community members in terms of basic participation. Of course, it's actually much greater than that, since a professional can answer a lot more questions. Perhaps it's more like 2,000 additional community members. That’s quite a step up for many smaller communities!

When your own experts participate, “your support activities will remain at the center of the customer service community, and be amplified by the community, not replaced.” Service agents can support the community to ensure issues are always successfully resolved, which will in turn create a larger active, engaged and happy community to respond to others and keep the knowledge base up to date and relevant – one big, positive customer cycle.

Over time, as your community grows, you’ll find that less and less agent involvement is needed. A good community platform will provide you with reports that let you monitor the metrics needed to understand this.

In addition, a community augmented by business process, becomes a critical differentiator because it makes agents much more efficient community participants and it can guarantee your customer’s SLA’s for service are always met, even with issues submitted to the community. This allows the enterprise to facilitate the participation of core customer service experts, as well as the community at large, to ensure the best possible service is delivered.