The Skinny

Customer Support is a big cost center for most organizations. In spite of most large enterprises dedicating a big budget and plenty of resources to provide high quality customer support, customers by and large are frustrated by the quality of support. 

Fireflies will build a platform to empower customers/users to support each other to solve their issues. The platform will provide interested customers training and rewards them for supporting other customers. It will transition customer support from a cost center into a marketing channel where customers promote the brand to other fellow customers.

There have been several incremental improvements to Customer Support over the past few years. These can broadly be categorized into four categories.

AI, ML and NLP have helped bots become dramatically better in the last few years.

The improvements in mining both structured and unstructured data from enterprise knowledge databases have also helped in improving the quality of results provided by chat bots and human customer support professionals. 

In spite of improved AI and increased efficiency in customer support organizations, customers are still unhappy by and large. 

Our hypothesis is that this is because of the missing empathy. A bot or a customer support professional will always be perceived by a customer as someone on the other side of the table. 

We propose a network of empowered users who can help each other with their issues and get rewarded for their effort. 

This network of users will have to be combined with a knowledge graph that comprises of generic knowledge from public databases as well as industry/enterprise specific information that is obtained from the participating companies. 

User + Knowledge Network

The user base is stored in a knowledge graph connecting customers and support concepts in a graphical node structure. 

Concepts

Users should be able to select from different concepts and easily connect with those who are experts in the concepts of interest

Experts become brand ambassadors

Users who are experts in different concepts can not only help other users and build a following, but also use their following to become ambassadors for different companies.

For instance, an expert user in router issues becomes a valuable ambassador for wireless companies to have as a proponent of their brand. 

Empower users with training

Users who help others and show initiative can access training material from participating companies as well as public training material and industry best practices to improve their knowledge and become more effective in helping and participating in the network.

Rewards

Users who help others can earn rewards through micro payments from companies and also earn reputation points to become influencers in the community. 

Tech Architecture

We envision the technology architecture to look something like this:

This network of empowered users can make the cloud platform that Fireflies is built on, the platform for customer support for a large number of large enterprises.

More importantly this can also be a seminal network that empowers users to help each other and disrupt the notion of customer support.