How Crowdsourcing is Shaping the Future of Digital Interaction
Crowdsourcing is quickly evolving and gaining notoriety in the business world. According to a study performed by the company Eyeka in 2014, in the past 10 years, 85% of the top global brands have used crowdsourcing efforts within their company. As the world moves further into the digital age, companies need to find faster and more innovative ways to collect the best ideas around. Interacting digitally through crowdsourcing is the quickest way this can be done.
A growing service among a variety of industries, crowdsourcing is the next step for your company when it comes to extra support. Conventional means of communicating is limited to in-house interactions. Yet, crowdsourcing is like a hive-mind though, opening you up to a larger workforce. They are filled with diverse sets of skills, information, backgrounds, and experiences you can use to help your company. Crowdsourcing is the way to shape your company’s future in the right direction.
Here’s how the innovation of crowdsourcing will change digital interactions for you and your company.
Social Media Collaboration
Companies need to proactively engage with their audience to keep their services or products relevant to the masses. The internet is driving relationships between companies and their consumers closer together. This is why businesses and organizations are using the internet to find new ways to engage and keep up. They are doing this to develop new initiatives that align to their consumers’ liking. Since social media efforts are mostly instant, it allows companies access to information from a wide audience in a cheaper and faster way. The quicker information is received, the quicker companies can interpret it.
Customer Interaction
Benefits of crowdsourcing don’t end at the business front. Connectivity through crowdsourcing allows consumers to share and collaborate knowledge with their peers as well. With the ability to communicate with potential and current consumers, information and answers can be relayed back quickly. This allows the consumers to get involved on their own volition.
In fact, many businesses are taking advantage of this type of opportunity by providing their own online platforms on their websites. However, it is imperative that the platform created has the user experience in mind. A good UI design, coupled with app design and development, increases the likeability of online interactions. If the social collaboration platform you choose is not easily accessible or has a confusing interface, ideas may not get shared effectively, and the crowd won’t come back.
In-house Communication
Not only can you use outside crowds for information, but you can also tap into the collective insights of your own employees. Crowdsourcing platforms within your company will promote communication growth. This allows companies to gain more information from their employees. Rather than the traditional one-on-one meeting environment, digital interactions encourage employees to weigh in on different topics and discussions. Leaders can push ideas and concepts forward while getting the input from the entire team. Platforms allow constant communication and easier access to information from other sectors of the business as well.
Several functionalities that crowdsourcing platforms can use to boost communication in the office are :
● Direct messaging- Be able to connect to anyone in the office to use their knowledge and expertise
● Open forums — Openly ask questions to anyone and receive answers quickly
● Constant alerts and notifications — Always be updated and connected
● Communal upload documents and information — Have access to all of the information you need
Feedback
Crowdsourced communication can also be done through digital employee feedbacks or customer feedbacks. For example, an anonymous or identified suggestion box can be implemented to elicit feedback from staff or customers. All of this information, including ideas, comments, reviews, votes and other types of data are online and visible to the business. The appropriate staff will have access anytime they need to. Who else knows better about problems and potential solutions than the employees and customers from your company?
Here are 3 tips to encourage crowdsourcing through feedback:
● Ask for Feedback — Ask open-ended questions to collect valuable insight through an active and always ongoing conversation.
● Create Contests — Host a social media feedback contest to foster ideas
● Use Polls and Surveys — Collect ideas, opinions, and feedback with polls and surveys
This guest post is authored by Nick Rojas. Nick Rojas is a business consultant and writer who lives in Los Angeles. He has consulted small and medium-sized enterprises for over twenty years. He has contributed articles to Visual.ly, Entrepreneur, and TechCrunch. You can follow him on Twitter @NickARojas, or you can reach him at NickAndrewRojas@gmail.com.
This story was originally published on the IdeaScale blog here.
