Crowdsourcing Service Reporting and Technical Support
A new iPhone app lets AT&T customers report when they have experienced a dropped or failed call, no connection, data failure, or poor voice quality. It’s called Mark the Spot (iTunes link). I had to wonder at first if it was a hoax, because after all, if you have a data failure how are you going to report it from the very phone that had the data failure? Apparently it works but the application was pulled the same day it was released, though I can’t speculate on why. Too many downloads? Or too many reports? Or another reason entirely? At any rate, it’s now back on the iTunes site and appears to be the real deal. If the app enables you to mark and report your GPS coordinates where it happened, it’s a great application for crowdsourcing the task of locating outage problem areas. It would speed up the mapping process, I would imagine.
On this post titled “Google & Twitter vs Call Centers“, The Social Media Guy asked his Facebook friends “do you usually google your questions before calling a customer service number or do you normally call for support as soon as you need help?” The variety of answers are entertaining and even funny, but also point to Google and Twitter being the front line of crowdsourced technical support.
At Indiana University in Bloomington, students are staffing the IT support lines, but IU will also try crowdsourcing according to this article, “Colleges Try ‘Crowdsourcing’ Help Desks to Save Money” in The Chronicle of Higher Education. According to the article,
Indiana has something called the Knowledge Base, with more than 15,000 articles on just about any technology installed on the campus (even one on connecting an Xbox to the campus network). Until now, though, only help-desk employees could add or revise articles, which means the resource is expensive to maintain and not always up-to-the-minute.
Some articles will be marked “Use at your own risk” while others will be tested, vetted, and expert approved. But this type of project does not have students reporting service outages, that I can see.
What are examples of a similar pattern, where the users report the problems and enable other users to find or fix their problems?
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