Monday, July 17, 2006

The Tech-Support Wisdom of Crowds

Regular readers will know of my distrust of 'The Wisdom of Crowds'.

Now Qunu has created a system to match up users needing tech support with [unaffiliated, unpaid] domain-experts. All this through Jabber-compatible IM clients (and the comment on KoolIM at the end of the list is classic)!

I know that customer support via chat can work well - Ndizani (now defunct) was doing this for Sento for McAfee 5 years ago!

Of course Qunu is adding the Web2.0 goodness!
1) Feedback on the helpfulness of the 'expert'
2) Feedback on the system itself
3) Tagging of subject areas (amusingly the demo pic has "web2.0" as a tag)

As to whether this is all not just an unpaid helpdesk:
Passionate volunteers will provide better and more timely information. They hope.

Plans for providing for-pay matching (i.e. fees for experts) are in the works.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This website is so cool. i think people should check it out!

Al said...

Not my tests!

Check out Qunu.

Anonymous said...

Great post,

KoolIM allows you to access Instant Messenger at work or school. Check out the KoolIM Web Messenger

You can access MSN web Messenger and Web MSN

You can access AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and other web messengers directly from your web browser.