Crowdsourcing vs. Hiring Employees?

July 28, 2008 on 2:24 pm | In Uncategorized |

There is a somewhat surprising element to the Intuit announcement, highlighted earlier this week by ZDNet’s Tom Foremski. During a presentation at Fortune magazine’s Brainstorm conference, Intuit CEO Brad Smith spoke about the company’s efforts to tap into the power of the Internet to better serve customers. In the video included with Foremski’s post, Smith mentions that as part of that effort, the company has recognized that in many cases, customers can deliver higher value to other customers than Intuit employees can. He says:

… Are we paying employees today to do the work that our customers would volunteer to do, and actually do better than us?

He notes that after Intuit put a Turbo Tax Live Community feature into its popular Turbo Tax software, 40 percent of customers’ questions were answered by other customers, with a higher degree of accuracy than ever before, and at no added cost to Intuit.

I remembered mentioning Intuit when I wrote about companies using social networking for business advantage. I tracked down the post from September of 2006 and found a similar reference to what Smith calls “innovation in an age of customer empowerment.” It said that some 70 percent of inquiries on Intuit’s Quicken forum were being answered by customers rather than Intuit staffers. It also mentioned Intuit planned to beef up the forums with blogging and podcasting tools.