We designed Helpstream to address the customer service application needs of Web-based businesses.  But what is a Web-based business?

My simple answer to that question is that a Web-based business is a business or organization that would be seriously crippled if the Web were to suddenly shut down overnight.  Sort of like if we suddenly lost electrical power.

Like electricity, the Web has become a neccesity.   We assume it’s there, we leverage it to innovate and to create sustainable competitive advantage, and it impacts everyone and everything we do.  Our dependence on the Web and its impact on how we do things wasn’t planned in advance.  It just happened.  Kind of like our dependence on electrical power.  This super-utility we call the Web connects so many things—people, ideas, data, systems, information, processes, organizations, social structures, languages, and cultures—that the methods by which organizations will maximally leverage the Web going forward are still evolving.  All we know for sure is that the 3 pillars of business—people, process, and technology—will be assembled in radically different, Web-leveraged ways to create value for customers.  The only thing that won’t change is the need to have happy customers.

That’s right, at the end of the day business is all about creating happy customers.  Except for a few monopolists, that has always been true.  Yet it’s striking how, even after organizations have discovered ways to leverage other parts of their business through the Web, we live in a time when customers are less happy than before.

Because of this, very few organizations are satisfied with the state of their customer service processes today. When you dig into the problem, you quickly discover that a lot of the blame lies with the current customer service systems.  The applications the companies are using haven’t been able to keep up with the fundamental challenges companies face when they move the bulk of their business to the Web.  SaaS was a good first step, but the early SaaS vendors just took the old way of doing customer service and put it on SaaS.  Fixing the Web-enablement problem requires a clean sheet approach.   Customer service business processes need to be re-engineered for the Web, with applications designed and architected specifically for the Web.  The user experience has to be re-rengineered to fit the new and evolving expectations of Web-enabled customers.  That’s exactly what we’ve done at Helpstream, providing real advantages to organizations that recognize that the Web has changed things.

Think about it. Old-style customer service is such an “us” vs. “them” proposition.  Customers of Web-based businesses won’t stand for that.  They don’t tolerate having their problems deflected, they need partners. They expect collaboration.  They want two-way conversations.  They want the crowdsourcing of knowledge and they want to participate in a community.  Savvy Web companies, for their part, recognize that their customers often know more about their products and services than they do and that customers want to participate.  They want to tap into the Voice of the Customer.  They want to invite their customers to engage. Leveraging the Web, we’ve enabled all of this and more with Helpstream.

But that’s only the first step.  It’s very easy to see that once a company starts broadly engaging with its customer base using the Web and really learns how to listen, the next big step is figuring out how to take those insights and make them actionable across the entire organization.  The strategic operational challenge becomes getting customer engagement activity more tightly integrated with business systems and processes.  Leading organizations want to get insights derived from collaboration with their user community turned into actions that yield real, positive results.  For them, Web-leveraged customer service is only the beginning.  Helping these organizations turn the Voice of the Customer into automated, actionable insight is the next big step for us here at Helpstream.