A CREATIVE WAY TO ENGAGE YOUR OWN EMPLOYEES: “INCROWDSOURCING”

More and more organizations are looking outside for solutions to some of the challenges that they are facing. That is an excellent way of getting in touch with experts, who are the frontrunners in their particular subject.

According to Wikipedia crowdsourcing is: a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm, or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.

This methodology could also be used internally. This “incrowdsourcing” is perfectly suited to engage employees who are daily in touch with customers, but who are traditionally not involved in the marketing and sales processes.

There are many ‘forgotten’ groups in organizations who know quite well what the customer needs, but they are simply not being asked to express their ideas. When you get them involved in the process they will feel valued and fulfilled. And the implementation of their ideas is effortless, as they were the initiator in the first place.

Here are some of the people in your incrowd:
- Receptionist
- Project managers
- Service engineers
- Maintenance engineers
- Waiters
- Administrators
- Invoice specialists
- Customer services
- Cleaners
- Janitors
- Drivers

You can ask any of them how to improve your services and they will immediately come up with at least five suggestions. If you seriously check their contributions, they will be your eyes and ears in the market.

A great example is what Best Buy is doing with @Twelpforce. Best Buy is encouraging hundreds of employees to handle online customer service and company promotions via Twitter, even airing commercials not mentioning their own website but merely the URL of the profile they created. Best Buy employees can use their company and Twitter ID to register for the service, after which tweets from the lot of them will be displayed in a single stream on the same page.
Once registered, tweeting Best Buy employees from across all operations can send messages from the @Twelpforce account.


So, in what way are you using “incrouwdsourcing” to engage your employees??

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RADICAL SERVICE INNOVATION

www.theproperway.com



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