Benefits
When the Consortium for Service Innovation first started dreaming about replacing the linear escalation model in support organizations with a loopy collaboration model, we estimated benefits for the organization, the knowledge workers, and most importantly, the customers. As Members began to experiment with a swarming model, we found that our early expectations were wrong. Tangible benefits realized by early adopters came faster than we expected, and were much greater than we imagined.
The benefits of Intelligent Swarming include:
- Skills development
- Faster knowledge transfer between people
- Create T-shaped people (develop breadth and depth of knowledge) and a T-shaped organization
- Far faster time to proficiency for knowledge workers
- Improved resolutions
- Faster resolution on new issues
- More creative problem solving
- More effective way to solve complex, cross-product, and multi-vendor issues
- Knowledge worker engagement
- Increased job satisfaction
- Increased employee engagement and loyalty
- Improved customer experience
- Minimizes customer effort with greatly reduced or eliminated case transfers
- More frequent resolutions on the first touch
- Knowledge creation
- Rich, multi-perspective knowledge capture as an outcome of collaborative problem solving
- Continuous improvement of the knowledge base through reviewing and updating upon reuse
Intelligent Swarming creates an organization that is resilient and adaptive to change. When mature and highly functioning, an Intelligent Swarming organization continually optimizes the unbounded network by connecting people to content (knowledge articles) for known issues and connecting people to people for new issues. We no longer depend on a linear process that is designed to treat every situation the same. It is easy to argue that the greatest benefit to Intelligent Swarming is optimizing people's ability to contribute by leveraging all of their skills and competencies.
That being said, your mileage may vary. The actual benefits you realize depend on a number of factors:
- Degree to which knowledge workers easily collaborate already
- Ratio of new vs. known requests (known being issues that are captured and findable in the knowledge base)
- Percentage of high severity requests
- Percentage of highly complex issues
- Nature of the products or processes being supported
- Characteristics of customers being supported
For more specifics on Member experiences and quantification of benefits for specific adopters, see the Intelligent Swarming case studies.
Intelligent Swarming Case Studies: