We designed Helpstream to address the customer service application needs of Web-based businesses.  But what is a Web-based business?

My simple answer to that question is that a Web-based business is a business or organization that would be seriously crippled if the Web were to suddenly shut down overnight.  Sort of like if we suddenly lost electrical power.

Like electricity, the Web has become a neccesity.   We assume it’s there, we leverage it to innovate and to create sustainable competitive advantage, and it impacts everyone and everything we do.  Our dependence on the Web and its impact on how we do things wasn’t planned in advance.  It just happened.  Kind of like our dependence on electrical power.  This super-utility we call the Web connects so many things—people, ideas, data, systems, information, processes, organizations, social structures, languages, and cultures—that the methods by which organizations will maximally leverage the Web going forward are still evolving.  All we know for sure is that the 3 pillars of business—people, process, and technology—will be assembled in radically different, Web-leveraged ways to create value for customers.  The only thing that won’t change is the need to have happy customers.

That’s right, at the end of the day business is all about creating happy customers.  Except for a few monopolists, that has always been true.  Yet it’s striking how, even after organizations have discovered ways to leverage other parts of their business through the Web, we live in a time when customers are less happy than before.

Because of this, very few organizations are satisfied with the state of their customer service processes today. When you dig into the problem, you quickly discover that a lot of the blame lies with the current customer service systems.  The applications the companies are using haven’t been able to keep up with the fundamental challenges companies face when they move the bulk of their business to the Web.  SaaS was a good first step, but the early SaaS vendors just took the old way of doing customer service and put it on SaaS.  Fixing the Web-enablement problem requires a clean sheet approach.   Customer service business processes need to be re-engineered for the Web, with applications designed and architected specifically for the Web.  The user experience has to be re-rengineered to fit the new and evolving expectations of Web-enabled customers.  That’s exactly what we’ve done at Helpstream, providing real advantages to organizations that recognize that the Web has changed things.

Think about it. Old-style customer service is such an “us” vs. “them” proposition.  Customers of Web-based businesses won’t stand for that.  They don’t tolerate having their problems deflected, they need partners. They expect collaboration.  They want two-way conversations.  They want the crowdsourcing of knowledge and they want to participate in a community.  Savvy Web companies, for their part, recognize that their customers often know more about their products and services than they do and that customers want to participate.  They want to tap into the Voice of the Customer.  They want to invite their customers to engage. Leveraging the Web, we’ve enabled all of this and more with Helpstream.

But that’s only the first step.  It’s very easy to see that once a company starts broadly engaging with its customer base using the Web and really learns how to listen, the next big step is figuring out how to take those insights and make them actionable across the entire organization.  The strategic operational challenge becomes getting customer engagement activity more tightly integrated with business systems and processes.  Leading organizations want to get insights derived from collaboration with their user community turned into actions that yield real, positive results.  For them, Web-leveraged customer service is only the beginning.  Helping these organizations turn the Voice of the Customer into automated, actionable insight is the next big step for us here at Helpstream. 

In 1897, Teddy Roosevelt, one of my favorite U.S. Presidents, said: “The worst lesson that can be taught to a man is to rely on others and to whine over his sufferings.”

That has certainly proven to be valuable advice for many generations of Americans.  Self reliance has become part of the American value system, and most of us have been taught to “save our complaints for someone who cares”.  Teddy’s advice has endured for so long that most people think of it as common sense, one of the rules of the road for living a happy life.

But funny things are happening in the world of the Web that fundamentally challenge the wisdom of Teddy’s advice.

Just as web publishing and search engine technologies have changed the very nature of information—transforming it from a scarcity to something available in great abundance—we have entered an era in which “help” is increasingly being found in abundance as well.  Armed with 1) massive amounts of available information, 2) search technologies that make that information easily accessible, 3) web communities that bring people together, and 4) collaboration technologies that enable people in those communities to create, share, and mass-produce and edit information, younger generations are finding that Teddy’s so-called “common sense” is beginning to make no sense at all.

Young people today are beginning to wonder why you should do things yourself when you can get help from others to get things done more efficiently and effectively.  They’re wondering why they shouldn’t share their woes and frustrations when there are so many people willing to listen, respond, and help make things better.  Web communities and collaboration technologies have justifiably caused many people—particularly those who have spent most of their lives in a Web-enabled world—to question whether relying on others is really a bad thing after all.

This is just another example of how the Web is fundamentally changing things.

Here at Helpstream, we’ve spent a lot of time figuring out how to enable community building and collaboration as an integral part of the customer service experience—bringing an abundance of help to people when, where, and how they need it.

I recently stayed at one of the more modern hotels in Las Vegas and was reminded of one of the most often overlooked tenets of customer service: in order to respond to the voice of the customer, you must first be able to hear it.

The hotel where I stayed has a popular lounge on the top floor with a beautiful view of the city. (Ok, beautiful is probably the wrong word to use for Las Vegas, but you get the picture.) The lounge was accessible from my room elevator, so one evening I left my room, went up to the lounge, and was having a great time until I realized I had forgotten to take some prescription medication. So I went back to my room and after a few minutes went back to the elevator to return to the lounge.

From this moment on, the hotel experienced a customer service disaster. To this day, I don’t think they realize the financial impact of this disaster.  After I got into the elevator, despite numerous attempts, the elevator button to take me to the lounge wouldn't work.  After going up and down a couple of times, inserting my room key into the security slot, and asking other hotel passengers to do the same, I went back to the lobby to try another elevator.  No luck.  I tried other elevators in two separate elevator banks, but none of the lounge buttons worked.  Then I noticed a dozen or more other people going in and coming out of the elevators looking dazed and confused.  It became obvious we were all having the same experience and we were all getting very frustrated and angry.

No one was at the service desk near the elevators, so I told a nearby bartender about the problem.  He told me that the only way to get to the lounge after 11pm is to use an elevator located 50 yards away, outside the hotel.  I looked at my watch and it was 11:10 pm.  I had left the lounge before 11pm and I tried to return after 11pm.  I looked everywhere and found no signs informing guests of this policy.  Someone at the hotel apparently decided to let its guests figure out this unfortunate policy on their own.  

When I finally made my way to the lounge elevator outside, I found a long line of people waiting to get in and a door man with an anti-customer attitude.  After I explained my situation, he curtly informed me “it has always been this way” and told me to wait in line and expect to pay a cover charge.  I believe “no thank you” is the proper English translation for what I said to him after that.    

I decided to take my displeasure to someone at the front desk.  I asked to talk to the shift manager.  He was very nice, heard me out, and offered his apologies….but provided no solution.  He didn’t even write down my complaint.  And then it dawned on me.  The reason this problem had not been fixed is because hotel staff, upon hearing about the problem, did not capture the complaint in a way that made it actionable by the organization.

I asked for the hotel manager's email address and I sent him a message detailing my experience.  I heard nothing from him during the duration of my stay, though I did receive a call from him soon thereafter.   Once we're able to connect I’ll probably be offered an explanation and an apology, but the hotel already missed its window of opportunity with me and with the many other guests it angered that night.  I’ve already posted my experience on a couple of English and Japanese travel-related web sites, undoubtedly influencing the decisions of other travelers for years to come.

The Web has a perfect memory that cannot be erased.  Organizations need to stop deflecting customer problems and start systematically capturing the customer experience from every touch point, building organizationally processes that spot problems quickly, react to them effectively, and, more importantly, anticipate customer needs in a way that results in customer delight.

We built Helpstream to make it easy for every customer-facing person in an organization to systematically capture and respond to customer issues, even providing customers an easy way to submit information themselves.  Helping organizations listen and respond to their customers is what Helpstream is all about.

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.

John Ragsdale of SSPA recently did an interesting post entitled, “Leveraging Web 2.0 to Improve Collaboration With and Among Customers”. In his post, John talks about the importance of getting input from customers and how it isn’t easy these days…

With many companies launching ‘voice of the customer’ initiatives, input from customers is becoming more sought after than ever before. As support organization push towards Value-Added Support, direct input from customers is critical to delivering service offerings and products that not only fit customer needs, but help deliver more business value and better enable customer success. But capturing customer feedback isn’t always easy, and relying on surveys as the only mechanism to gather input will soon exhaust the patience of some customers. Finding new ways to collaborate with customers, and encourage peer-to-peer customer collaboration, is a good strategy to collect the necessary input, as well as build stronger relationships with customers overall.

He has also talks about ways in which Web 2.0 capabilities can help…

The key, then, is to take your existing processes for customer collaboration and migrate them to the Web, incorporating community capabilities such as forums and Wikis to replace existing email distribution lists, conference calls, maybe even some local user group meetings. Once this online beachhead is established, you can begin to expand the community to incorporate additional processes and additional customers. When other customers see lively discussions going on around topics they are interested in, they will be much more likely to join in and participate.

As my previous post on SaaS 2.0 implies, we completely agree with John. We are currently working on innovative ways to take familiar collaborative capabilities and combine them with time-proven customer support practices to deliver benefits to both customers and vendors. Stay tuned.