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 the members began to implement the swarming model, we found that our early expectations were wrong. 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
- Created T-shaped people (breadth and depth)
- Faster time to proficiency for knowledge workers
- Improved resolutions
- Faster
- More creative
- 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
- Fewer hand-offs, reduced queue bouncing
- More frequent resolutions on the first touch
That being said: your mileage may vary. The actual benefits you realize depends on a number of factors:
- The degree to which knowledge workers easily collaborate already
- The ratio of new vs known requests (known being issues that are captured and findable in the knowledge base)
- The percent of high severity requests
- The percent of highly complex issues
- The nature of the products or processes being supported
- The characteristics of customers being supported
For more specifics on member experiences and quantification of benefits for specific adopters, see the Intelligent Swarming case studies.
Case Studies: