I’m often asked about our approach to re-inventing the customer service process, and to answer that question I usually point to a couple of my favorite books.

When it comes to solving problems, Moneyball and The Wisdom of Crowds are two great books that approach the subject from completely different points of view. Moneyball provides an example of how genius and expertise can create a completely new approach to solving a difficult problem. The Wisdom of Crowds, on the other hand, makes a convincing argument for how the opinions of a large number of people, when properly obtained and aggregated, will, on average, always provide better answers than those from an expert.

In the world of customer service, traditional ticketing and knowledge management systems have focused on the use of experts to solve customer problems, while 3^rd party “community” web sites have leveraged “crowdsourcing” techniques to provide a Web-enabled alternative for users. But when the Helpstream team started to look at this disintegrated “either / or” approach, we found ourselves asking “why not do both, and tightly integrate them?” After all, reliance on experts has been at the heart of problem solving since the dawn of civilization. It hasn’t been until the age of the Web that the “crowdsourcing” approach has even been possible, and it’s easy to see how difficult it would be for people and organizations grown accustomed to relying on experts to simply change their habits overnight. Also, while it’s intellectually easy to understand how “wisdom of crowds” results can be better than those from experts, it’s hard to imagine how “crowdsourcing” techniques could quickly lead to the type of breakthrough thinking seen in Moneyball.

So, in developing Helpstream, we came to the conclusion that companies and organizations need to be able to leverage both experts and crowds to provide the highest level of customer service possible. End users need to be able to collaborate with a company’s solution experts when they need to, and they need to be able to collaborate with large numbers of other end users when that will provide a better, faster alternative. Organizations need to re-engineer their business processes to leverage the power of the Web, but they also need those business processes to continue to accommodate both the creation and appropriate allocation of internal skills and knowledge. Organizations also need to be able to focus on the needs of individual users while gaining actionable insight from the aggregated experience of their entire customer base. So we designed Helpstream to do just that, helping companies amplify the “Voice of the Customer” across their entire organization like never before.

We call our approach “Collaborative Service”, and we believe it will fundamentally change the way companies interact with their customers. Helpstream is the collaborative service solution for a Web-enabled world.