And Now… Unsourcing
June 6th, 201275.2 million people are on Facebook, pretending to grow vegetables and raise animals in their browser windows? … Has it really come to this? Getting ribbons for bragging rights in Facebook games?
—The Future Where Soda Cans Have Screens
Via: The Economist:
Some of the biggest brands in software, consumer electronics and telecoms have now found a workforce offering expert advice at a fraction of the price of even the cheapest developing nation, who also speak the same language as their customers, and not just in the purely linguistic sense. Because it is their customers themselves.
“Unsourcing”, as the new trend has been dubbed, involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. Instead of speaking with a faceless person thousands of miles away, customers’ problems are answered by individuals in the same country who have bought and used the same products. This happens either on the company’s own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid anything for their efforts.
As might be imagined, the savings can be considerable. Gartner, the research company, estimates that using communities to solve support issues can reduce costs by up to 50%. When TomTom, a maker of satellite-navigation systems, switched on social support, members handled 20,000 cases in its first two weeks and saved it around $150,000. Best Buy, an American gadget retailer, values its 600,000 users at $5m annually.
To motivate members to participate, Lithium, a software company that provided TomTom’s and Best Buy’s systems, turns the whole thing into a game. Such “gamification”, increasingly ubiquitous in areas ranging from self-improvement to project management, works by awarding “kudos” points for a helpful answer, allowing helpers to “level up”. This boosts their status and often comes with a jokey honorific. Solve enough problems and you might eventually become a “super fan”, in the top 0.5% of responders.
Related: Black Mirror: 15 Million Merits
Research Credit: KL
for more info watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PkUgCiHuH8
The Pleasure Revolution: Why Games Will Lead the Way
Google Tech Talk (more info below)
November 10, 2011
Presented by Jesse Schell.
ABSTRACT
In the 21st century, it turns out that the principles for designing videogames have become the principles for designing everything. In this talk, Jesse explains some of the surprising consequences of the new world of pleasure-based design.