As more universities adopt web 2.0 technology, administrators want to know exactly how students are using these tool and what benefits they bring. Campus Technology addressed this question in their latest article “Wikis, Blogs, & More, Oh My!’

Here are two different ways Universities are using wikis, and their results:

Professor Kane at Boston University encourages students to submit their own exam questions via his Exam Question Workspace wiki. In a year, students submitted a whopping 600 questions overall.

At SUNY-Delhi, CIO Patrick Masson uses wikis to assist in policy decision-making. Masson says user response to this approach has been overwhelming. Over the course of one month, the school’s president made 73 edits, the coordinator of online learning made 58, the chair of budget and planning made 31, and the vice president of student housing made 29.

Here are three more suggestions from PBwiki educators: (more…)

 I was reading an interesting article today that got me thinking about customer service:

An industry rule of thumb is that a bug which costs $1 to fix on the programmer’s desktop costs $100 to fix once it is incorporated into a build, and thousands of dollars if it is identified only after the software has been deployed in the field.

How true - sometimes just a little extra effort on the customer service end can alleviate a ton of pain down the road (both for you and your customers). With the rise of sites like Consumerist, the world’s becoming a smaller place - just today, a certain BMW dealer in the Mid-West got slammed for some poor handling of an Ebay transaction. What could have been a relatively easy sale turned into a 3 day long online bashing with over 200,000 page views.

The lesson: make sure you’re consistently trying to “WOW” your customers - they’ll thank you in return.

Organizations of all sizes share one common problem: cohesiveness

The decision making has become highly fragmented - from marketing, to sales, to engineering, to services and so on.

This makes sense from an internal perspective because we need to measure individual efficiency and productivity - we’ve been running this way since the first assembly line was produced. Of course, there are some benefits to this approach:

• Payrolls are down
• Efficiency is high
• Profits are good

The problem is that the improvements are inwards focused and don’t lend themselves to creating metrics around the customer experience. Customer service managers have a hard time getting customer service improvements prioritized properly - database upgrades, infrastructure, security, etc - these things eat up 99% of the customer service budget.

So how do we solve this?

Find ways to enhance customer service capabilities without scrambling for capital expenditure approvals and without bugging IT. This benefits the customer and the IT manager - SaaS is perfect for this. More appropriately, PBwiki is perfect for this.

We know most customer service related deployments take time. Integration and system change take time - with complex customer service systems, it can take months and even years to get things running properly. Instead, use PBwiki to centralize your product information, best practices or other proprietary knowledge so that your workforce is empowered.

A few weeks ago, we attended a summit put together by our friends over at Get Satisfaction and they launched something they call the Company-Customer Pact. As they put it:

This pact is a call for shared responsibility between companies & customers — one that promises that both sides will hold up their end of the bargain to change the game. The document provides a way to opt into a set of shared values. It’s a balanced statement of responsibilities for companies and customers.

You might wonder why we need this, as it seems like common sense. But if common sense were enough more people would be employing these principles now. We’ve been trained by the bad habits of corporate culture to turn away from the anger of alienated customers reacting to an environment where it’s common place for companies to hide behind phone trees, avoid fault, and employ anonymous and in-human call centers that makes them hard if not impossible to reach. Or by engaging in practices like price-gauging and issuing confusing bills and policies.

We’ve signed the pact and we’d love to encourage you to do the same - head over to ccpact.com today and get involved! You can also read Get Satisfaction’s full post here.

All businesses know that the degree of customer service excellence is relative - it’s based on customer expectations. Many profitable companies do poorly on customer service and they thrive - which begs the question: is it smart to invest in customer service?

This is why it is absolutely critical to measure customer experience at the beginning.

Key Questions:

• What are the customer’s expectations?
• Is it different across industries, market segments or channels?
• How is the experience within a particular industry, segment or channel helping or hurting?

The last thing we want to do is overspend on customer service, but without an understanding of the components of the experience and a measurement of the success of the experience - it’s difficult to pinpoint areas of improvement and create appropriate initiatives to deliver on those.

Discovering the gaps between the customer’s expectations and your brand’s promise is the most important work that your customer service organization can do.

Improved customer service experience can be approached from two angles - business process changes or technology choices (or some combination of the two). I’d like to share some key trends shaping the business processes related to customer service today:

• Take an “outside-in” approach: a growing number of businesses are realizing the importance of having a greater explicit customer interaction when designing new service processes. Service executives need to be asking themselves: “What is the customer’s experience as they consume the service?”
• Traditional customer service tools have been “field based” or even “task based” - service executives need to move to more “intent driven” systems for customer service agents to use. Agents need to be empowered with a system that shows them a customer’s real context - their last interaction with your company, overall background, current sales deals, customer satisfaction. Give your agents a 360 degree view of the customer and things will inevitably improve.
• Home service workers are a great way to improve response times, attain localized support teams for your global products or services and reduce operating costs. Although this does raise some unique challenges, it is definitely worth exploring.
• Fear of taking responsibility: for customers, for change, for measurements. Few organizations want to empower a single person to change processes - especially with so many other variables in play. On the other hand, few service executives want to “stick their neck out” for fear of getting it cut off by upper management. Customer service executives need to take responsibility and ensure that their customer’s expectations are fully met.

Don’t forget: the customer’s experience needs to match your brand’s promise. If you’re in a competitive market (aren’t we all), customer service can be the differentiator between you and your competition.

We’re big fans of spicy food here at PBwiki and so today we set up a contest at the office to see who can take down the spiciest hot sauce within a set period of time.

The rules:

• We used the following hot sauces (generously provided by TK):
  • Round 1: Dave’s hurtin’ Jalapeno
  • Round 2: Great White Shark Predator Sauce
  • Round 3: Dave’s Insanity sauce
• There was a one minute waiting period between rounds - as measured by David
• Absolutely no drinks were permitted
• Each round consisted of one level teaspoon

The participants:

Ramit: <I’m super impressed that Kristine actually competed>

Kristine: <This is what happens when you work with a bunch of men - you end up chugging hot sauce. This time Ramit is going down - way down >

The first taste:

Second thoughts after the second round - Paul has the defibrillator handy:

David acted as the judge and jury:

This is why you should come work with us at PBwiki.

I’m nearing my first two months here at PBwiki and as they say, time flies when you’re having fun! We’ve come a long way since I started:

• We’ve setup support metrics and begun measuring the team (and the company) wherever possible
• We’ve added 2 more great people to round out our support team
• We’ve improved the PBwiki community and our entire team here at PBwiki is actively involved 

And the best part - we’ve got a lot more on the way in the coming weeks!  We’ve made some conscious decisions to ensure that our customer’s needs come first - our support team is actively working to ensure that the answers you receive are high quality and relevant to your situation. Although we sacrificed some speed for this, we feel this is the right decision - I’ve received some great feedback from many of you (keep it coming!) with regards to our new support processes - here’s one that I got just today: 

I gotta tell you, I am MUCH happier with your help on my recent help ticket (and for hearing me out with my complaints about past help tickets) then I would have expected. You guys are doing good things on the customer relations front, and I appreciate it      

So, for those of you that are already using PBwiki - thanks for sticking with us, we’ll make sure we continue getting better at everything we do. And for those of you not using PBwiki - what are you waiting for?!  Hear what our users are talking about and get involved in the discussions here! 

As most of you know, we recently locked up our forums and started a new community discussion space here. A number of you emailed me directly asking for more insight into how we made our decision here at PBwiki. So, rather than send out a mass email, here’s the answer:

The problems with classic forums are well known, particularly in the context of mainstream customer service. The best answers get buried in long conversations, they breed endless duplicate topics, they’re hard to search, they tend to be either under-populated or clubby. They generally aren’t friendly or inviting to casual use. We’re using Satisfaction to harness open conversation without falling into these traps. One example of how we’re doing this so far is the “talk box” at the top of the page-by merging the process of actually asking a question and searching. The result is very few duplicate topics, and more focused engagement around the issues. The pages are designed to be more like blog posts, with each topic creating a focused conversation piece that makes sense even when entered from a Google search. The conversation threads themselves are more personal.

From the standpoint of customer service, traditional forums are too general purpose to be that useful. We’re building tools that support the distinct activities that dominate conversations between our customers and the PBwiki team - questions, problems and ideas. There are outcomes and interactions in these activities that forums just are not suited to support. Satisfaction provides us the ability to mark certain answers as “official responses,” and our community to vote best answers to the top. This has the surprising effect of auto-generating FAQs based on the real interactions with and between our customers.The result is a more trusting, valuable conversation space. The value of this approach for providing a higher level of support will become apparent over time -or so we’re betting.

Feel free to join me (and the rest of the PBwiki Team) here as we talk more about why we made the switch - we’d love to hear any feedback you’ve got for us.

We just added two more folks to our support team (Welcome, Casey and Rachel!) and I wanted to talk about the choices we made along the way. We could hire support folks to do one of two things: 

• Do their job and go home.
• Do their job exceptionally well, make customers love PBwiki even more and then go home.

PBwiki’s support team chose the latter - here’s what I look for:

• Do we get excited thinking about bringing this person on board?

If there’s any doubt - move on. We need superstars to rub off positively on the rest of our superstars.

• Are they capable of doing exceptionally well at their job?

How passionate are they about what they do? How good do you think they can become? If both of these questions look good, you’ve got a great hire on your hands.

• How much hand holding will they need?

We need people with initiative - otherwise, constantly making sure they’ve done the right thing is going to eat up all of my time.

• Do they share PBwiki’s core values?

If they don’t, we risk losing PBwiki’s identity and becoming Boring Company, Inc. Test this by letting them support a handful of customers and watching the customer response - you’ll have your answer in short order. 

Will this get you the right candidates 100% of the time? Perhaps not - but it will significantly boost your chances of finding the right people along the away.