Customer help crowdsourced by customers.
The basic idea is this:
- You have a site where you sell something online (ecommerce)
- Someone wants to buy what you sell (product/service)
- Before buying it, you offer something (discount, points, prize, etc) in exchange for doing customer service for what you are selling. This should be measurable somehow (number of calls attended / duration of calls / attended customer feedback)
- If this person agrees, you ask for his phonenumber and availability for taking customer help calls (days/time)
- When someone else comes to your site looking for help about what you sell, he can enter his phonenumber on a simple form and click on 'receive call'
- Then (if available) the person who bought your stuff gets a phone call. When he answers, a recording asks him if he'd like to take a customer help call. If he agrees, the person seeking help gets called and the calls are connected.
- After the call, the person who got help, gets redirected to a short customer satisfaction survey (1 to 3 questions) to rate the help he got
Calls would be logged and recorded. There would be call and satisfaction statistics, etc.
You could charge for each call or on a per minute/hour base, so that you could profit from the assistance or at least pay for the discounts you are giving to the people who are helping you out.
What I like best about this, is that customers would be getting assistance from other customers. This is especially useful when you buy a product from an online retailer. Usually if you call customer service, the person who takes your call will know nothing about the product you bought, because doesn't own it, and he's never used it.