Learning is teaching in reverse
On BuzzMachine there's an interesting discussion going on about “customer service in reverse”
In the continuing Dell discussion, Steve Rubel answers Steve Baker’s question about how companies should deal with lots of bloggers raising lots of customer service issues:
Steve,
over time I think you’re going to see blog search and Web search tools
integrated into CRM systems. This will give customer service the tools
they need to manage individual issues that bubble on blogs. However,
you are right. PR professionals will increasingly need to not only
serve as an organization’s mouthpiece (one of them at least), but also
its eyes and ears. The best PR pros have done this for years. Blogging
just makes it easier to keep our finger on the public pulse.
This is
how we operate at CooperKatz. We monitor the blogosphere for all of our
clients. If we spot a customer issue, we route it to the right party to
manage. Occasionally, we also reach out ourselves to begin the
dialogue.Interesting… so imagine if rather
than having to go to companies for service — and waiting on hold and
waiting and waiting… — the companies came to us! What a concept.Think
of that world-in-reverse: You post a need online, tagged with a
microformat (more on that later), and people find you and bid to solve
your problem or sell you their product, selling you with price and also
with testaments of trust.That’s not the world in
reverse. That’s the world as it should be: The sellers come to the
customers, not the other way around. The customers becomes the
marketplace. I like that.
Now just
replace customer service issue with learning need. Wouldn’t
it be great if the explanations and solutions and training you needed
came to you when you asked for them?
Just-in-time learning or on-demand learning
is supposed to make this possible but these systems that place
information at the learner’s fingertips have one major drawback. The
people populating the systems with information and
training materials need to know in advance what the learner is
going to need.
Learning and communications departments
have the mandate to provide information to employees as quickly
and efficiently as possible but their processes are inherently
reactive. It takes time to recognize that a learning need exists and
then to recruit the appropriate subject matter expert to develop the
solution and then to deploy the “learning object” or “training module.”
There is a place for this kind of process of course, especially when it
comes to compliance issues. But there are many learning needs that
would be better served by a system that immediately taps into the
knowledge of the entire enterprise and aggregates solutions.
Such
a system, what we call an “emergent learning network” enables anyone
who might be able to help to respond. This is the way it frequently
works in the blogosphere. You publish a question on your blog (or as a
comment on someone else’s) and if it’s interesting enough and turns up
in the aggregator of someone who has an incentive to provide the
information you need or direct you to someone who can, then they will
respond.
Having just finished reading Freakonomics I am thinking about incentives. On places like Experts Exchange the
incentive is monetary but in most of the blogosphere the incentive is
in recognition (which of course can translate into money indirectly)
and this is the way it needs to be in the enterprise.
To be successful an emergent learning network needs—
-
to integrate with, complement and extend the sources of information already available
-
to integrate
seamlessly with users’ existing work processes, ideally allowing users
to adapt the input and output interfaces to suit their own needs -
to incorporate design and management of the network that encourages participation
-
what else?
