Customer Engagement Through Crowdsourcing

As proud users of a powerful live chat solution or someone seriously considering live help software as a tool in your customer service arsenal, you could consider crowdsourcing as just one more pathway to entrepreneurial innovation…

What is Crowdsourcing?
Simply take the concept of live chat to the next level of multi-channel communicative application and you have crowdsourcing. The concept isn’t new and has been around for ages. The modern Internet offers a structured way to jump start this concept in an entirely new online environment. Here is how it works. In typical Web 2.0 fashion, if you had a question, a project or even a thinly formulated business concept, which wasn’t really confidential, and you were interested in receiving global community feedback regarding it, you would put it out for comment on a crowdsourcing website. The process of announcing the value proposition, requesting comments and picking the one you like the most for a possible content prize, is called crowdsourcing.

As an online business veteran or head of an online community service organization, It is likely that you come across situations every day when you say to yourself, “Gosh, I wish I could get an expert or just some intelligent people to look at this idea and tell me if I am doing the right thing.” If you go through the motions of hoping to access an open platform for ideas, you are surely a candidate for crowdsourcing. Who isn’t?

Crowdsourcing Wiki
The website www. crowdsourcingexamples.pbworks.com is structured like a wiki. It provides a list of websites that allow various kinds of crowdsourcing activities complete with examples. It has categorized crowdsourcing into four distinct themes:

• Individual sites which leverage the power and potential of online crowds
• Brand sponsored corporate forums which harness the power of crowdsourcing for new ideas for their
• Brand initiatives that enable customers to customize products
• Competitions and award based contests which use crowdsourcing as a mode of innovation
  

If the concept of crowdsourcing has peaked your curiosity, do consider visiting some of the websites we have listed here. They will not only propel you into the world of shared opinion processing, you just might locate that million dollar idea you have been looking for at one of these websites once you post your proposition for open comment.

Information in a Box
Chaordix http://www.chaordix.com/
IdeaScale http://ideascale.com/index.html
Crowdspirit http://crowdspirit.com/
MobIncentive http://mobincentive.com/