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Unpaid Contributors Provide Corporate Tech Support
Hugh Pickens writes "The NY Times writes about Justin McMurry of Keller, TX, who spends up to 20 unpaid hours per week helping Verizon customers with high-speed fiber optic Internet, television and telephone service. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies, and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service. Such enthusiasts are known as lead users, or super-users, and their role in contributing innovations to product development and improvement — often selflessly — has been closely researched in recent years. These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers. 'You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that's where the magic happens,' says Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon. The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Lyle Fong, co-founder of Lithium Technologies whose web site advertises that a vibrant community can easily save a company millions of dollars per year in deflected support calls' and whose current roster of 125 clients includes AT&T, BT, iRobot, Linksys, Best Buy, and Nintendo. Lithium's customer service sites for companies offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and kudos counts. 'That alone is addictive,' says Fong. 'They are revered by their peers.' Meanwhile McMurry, who is 68 and a retired software engineer, continues supplying answers by the bushel, all at no pay. 'People seem to like most of what I say online, and I like doing it.'"
1) Tap into old school hacker community mentality.
2) Rely on good people to do your large organizations work for free.
3) Degrade your own service.
4) Profit!
Of course peolpe helping each other and a solid community are great, but in the context of this happening in lieu of large for-profit organizations providing quality service? I think not.
Seeing how they point out how this can save them millions of dollars leaves me nonplussed.
"The NY Times writes about Justin McMurry of Keller, TX, who spends up to 20 unpaid hours per week helping Verizon customers"
No way should you ever do this. If it's worth doing then it's worth getting paid for doing it. And for each McMurry out there there is one less paid job at Verizon. Same with friends or neighbours. I'll fix their PC, but only if they pay me.
People who know their shit can help others
Very true. Conversely, people who think they know their shit, but in fact don't, can be a major detriment. And we know that there are a whole lot of them around.
No way should you ever do this. If it's worth doing then it's worth getting paid for doing it. And for each McMurry out there there is one less paid job at Verizon.
Exactly! I've heard there are even idiots who will write and support entire computer programs for free! No wonder we're in an economic crisis...
Donate free food here
Sounds like they could afford to put one or two of these guys on salary, then.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I'm one of these types of people myself. If there is a software product that I'm personally very fond of and I feel that more folks might benefit from it than do, I'll actively attempt to support the product through this type of forum activity, giving advice, tutorial writing and generally ranting about it on my travels around the web.
I enjoy it. I dare say there's an element of liking the positive feedback too. I also feel that by supporting the userbase of my chosen product I might be helping retain a few users who might otherwise flee to a competing product that I personally don't like/use. This, it seems to me, contributes towards the product's manufacturer continuing to produce and update it which IS a positive benefit to me. I'm not being paid cash - I'm being paid in the slight boost to the likeliness of my chosen product continuing to exist and remain current.
It's worth noting though that providing tools to drive attention to your most vociferous, active and evangelic users can be a double edged sword. Since folks like myself aren't being paid, we have no incentive to be anything other than completely honest in answering support requests.
If your new version is borked; if your long anticipated new feature turns out to be vapor, if your own customer service folks are crap - in short, if those evangelic users get to a point where they feel betrayed by the manufacturer - it's going to be exactly those highly visible, spotlit users with audiences of their own that are going to tell it like it is.
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
Because then quality of tech support will go back to where it was: low.
There are several articles out there that cover the topic of how material/financial motivation actually diminishes the quality of work instead of increasing it when compared to an intrinsic motivation alone. I'm not going to cite them all. Look them up, if you want to, google's your friend.
Given the above statement, I'm only going to give some food for further thought: the people doing tech-support "for free" right now are those who enjoy it. They are those who both like and understand what they are doing. Now, if you have a problem, chances are slim that somebody not paid for it will be intrinsically motivated to help you, but *if* that happens, then that person is just about the best one in the world you could have ended up with...
Now, if you would be able to give money for tech support to that person, that would probably not do too much harm. But the problem is that you have no way of giving money 'only to intrinsically motivated persons' -- the moment you're paying somebody, they're not (purely) intrinsically motivated, period. Worse: you cannot even tell whether the next guy is going to help you for the money in the first place.
While it would be a good thing to be able to reward the 'selfless' ones, the problem is that as soon as you start rewarding, you start poisoning a 'selfless' community with 'selfish' people, who are out for the money, and thus you basically end up where you are today: to tech support that sucks.
Since I'm at it: why desperately try to pay back those people, who are obviously rather content with *not* being paid? Why fix it, if it's not broken? Is it because you're somehow feeling guilty that somebody is solving your problems, and you wish return the favor? Well, if you genuinely want to return the favor: help somebody yourself. They'll appreciate it, and eventually, they'll also help somebody else, in the end *maybe* reaching your original helper (the one you were trying to reward, remember? :)
But even if your original helper won't feel the traces of your good deeds: I can assure you, if you're helping somebody without expecting to get a reward, it will enable you to be able to accept help from somebody without feeling the urgent need to reward the helper with anything beyond a "thank you" :-) You're going to be happy, the original helper was happy all along, and other people along the way got happy too.
One. Big. Happy. Family. :-)
Why desperately trying to bring money to the game?
Volunteer effort is great. I try to give as much as possible for Wikipedia - hey, it's a hobby. I also do other stuff to help and bring enjoyment for my peers.
But when people start making money on your free effort - indeed, rely you to do your free effort for the continued success of a company, then you're little better than slave (in that you can at least walk away). I mean, I could still see myself giving advice on a forum if I knew how to help, but this.. these guys are actually connected to the company, right?
And 20 hours per week? Even on poor, minimum wage salary (seven dollars an hour?) thats 140 dollars per week, 560 dollars a month. And if he can really give much better experience than the idiots at Verizon, we're talking at least manager level. What's that, double the wage? Triple?
This thing makes me pretty angry. And those people "helping" are real chumps.
Chronologically late.
So you create an environment of such bad customer service that you basically require the charity of others to operate, and you call that "magic"?
I know people are going to try to compare the volunteer efforts of these folks to open source, but it's not the same. With open source, you're actually creating something, not propping up and enabling the bad practices of a corporation. It's the difference between giving a man a fish and giving him a fishing pole: if there's no goal of fixing the underlying problem then the charity can be worse than not helping at all.