Crowdsourcing Customer Service

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A school project made by the daughter of a Method Products "advocate" using recycled materials.

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"The lightbulb went off," Muller says, when they discovered their customers were actually asking and answering each others' questions in the comments section of the Valleyschwag blog. "In the middle of the night, our European customers would troubleshoot problems on our Web site while we were sleeping." It wasn't the most elegant solution, and most customers still went to e-mail. But Muller sensed an opportunity.

By making existing conversations public, "you can translate what is currently noise into actual information," he says. "Instead of 100 different e-mails saying the same thing, it's one public problem or question and 99 people saying I have this problem or question, too."

Twitter Bug

At Twitter (BusinessWeek, 4/2/07), that transparency is already changing the internal dynamics around customer service. In July one frustrated Twitter user wrote the company's support team describing a problem he was having with the service.The e-mail response he got back was friendly but ultimately unsatisfying: "It's a bug we've been meaning to fix, but it's fallen behind bigger priorities; very good point though. I've shared your comments with the team." But when another Twitterer with the same problem posted about it on Twitter's Satisfaction page—and other users chimed in—the problem became a priority. "Everybody in the company could see it, which gave the support person and product manager the leverage they needed to make change happen," Muller says. Within a few days, the bug was fixed.

Method Product's Lie says he saw Satisfaction as a promising way to take the pulse of customer opinion to enhance—rather than replace—the customer-service on his company's own site. "It's a way to engage ourselves into the conversation and at the same time keep it authentic," he says. But he expects smaller companies without dedicated marketing or customer-service teams to rely much more heavily on Satisfaction and to integrate it more fully into the architecture of their existing Web sites.

Tony Wright, co-founder of a three-person Web startup called RescueTime, says he hopes so. On the first day of the software's private beta test with 250 users, RescueTime got 18 e-mails, Wright says. "Which is great, but also pretty horrifying, when you start doing the math. What happens when we invite 1,000 users? Or 10,000?" As Wright explained on RescueTime's blog, "at the end of the day, anything that allows customers to find satisfaction without pulling us away from making the product better is pretty darn compelling for us." Within a week, Wright had scrapped RescueTime's own online forum ("a spam magnet") for Satisfaction and hasn't look backed since. So far, he's—yes—satisfied.

Miller is a New York-based staff writer covering startups and small business. Miller is a graduate of Brown University.