The Emperor’s new Social CRM clothes

"How do I look?"

"Wonderful, your majesty! Your new Social CRM coat really brings out your customer-centric side"

"Do you really think so? It was made by the tailors in Silicon Valley you know, using the very latest Fabric-as-a-Service (FaaS). The fabric is so fine it looks almost invisible"

"Incredible, your highness. You look just like the King of Zappos, or his Royal Highness, the Prince of Threadless.com"

"Excellent. What do you think my subjects will think?"

"They will marvel Sire. They have long expressed a desire for you to set up a Facebook Fan Page so that they may honour you"

Make no mistake, I am a huge advocate of Social CRM. To anyone who has worked in the CRM space for some time, it should make perfect sense. Social CRM completes CRM. It's the missing piece in the CRM puzzle that gives an organisation the potential to listen to the direct voice of the customer and use that feedback to co-create products and improve services. It allows an organisation to create a platform to facilitate and help customer to customer collaboration. If your customer's feel positive about their experiences they may chose to answer queries, recommend products and fix problems on your behalf (see my post on "Outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers").

But, to clear, there are many things that Social CRM cannot do. I'd advocate that anyone embarking on a Social CRM journey understand these before they proceed.

Social CRM cannot compensate for poor products or services

If you core offering is poor (you can't deliver products on time or your widgets routinely break down after 6 months) then Social CRM is not a band-aid that will fix those issues. In fact, more likely, your customers will use social tools against you (see my post on "Star wars and Social CRM" – focus on the dark side of the force). Social CRM can however, help you to listen, understand the issues from the perspective of your customers and then improve and respond.

Learning and improving do not automatically follow listening

Social CRM provides a platform to listen to the customer's social voice. Many organisations who start deploying Social CRM technologies, start by deploying a listening platform. The key challenge, however, is translating the learning gained from listening to customers into improving products, services, offers etc. This is as much an organisational and cultural issue as it is a technology issue.

Social CRM does not replace CRM and cannot compensate for a poor CRM foundation

Customers turning to social channels to fix a service issue, often do so as a last resort once other options have failed. In a recent post on Virgin Media, I was recently positively surprised that someone had responded to my #fail tweet, however, I would argue that my service problem shouldn't have escalated to the level where I felt I had to tweet in the first place - all traditional CRM channels had let me down.

Social CRM does not guarantee customer participation or success

I recently read Jeff Jervis's blog post post where he recited the story of a newspaper published who asked Mark Zukerberg how he could go about building his own community. Mark responded; "you can't". The point he was making was that communities already existed and the right question to ask was how they could help them do what they wanted to do. The Social CRM world is already littered with the corpses of failed social marketing campaigns, that have tried to "engage" customers and entice them to participate in their viral community campaigns before they have listened and understood what their customers really wanted  (see example from UCC Coffee in Japan).

It's easy to get caught up with the hype of any technology. Most technology buyers end up buying far more functionality than they really need to solve the business problem that prompted them to begin evaluating technology in the first place. Whilst I am very bullish on the potential of Social CRM and constantly enthused by good examples of Social CRM in action, I think it's always worth looking in the mirror and considering with brutal honesty how your subjects (customers, employees shareholders etc) will feel about your new clothes!

"Customer to Customer" and the legend of Kachiwachi

Often I ask clients to describe their multi-channel capabilities. Most start by focussing on the channels that they own and control like their contact centre, their web site, their field sales force. CRM taught us to think that way. But customer's don't necessarily abide by those rules. For many customers, peer to peer is often the first channel they use to interact with an organisation and it is certainly the channel that they trust the most. We all use the customer-to-customer channel to ask what our friends think, recommend a local supplier or fix a problem with a product (see my post on outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers).

Recently I attended the Lithium launch event in London and I was introduced to Kachiwachi. Kachiwachi is not a buzzword or a new fangled management practice from Japan. Kachiwachi is an individual and a customer of Logitech who interacts on Logitech's customer support forum. In the last few years Kachiwachi has posted around 40,000 comments on Logitech's customer support forum and has earned the status of "Logi Legend". Since June 2006, when he joined the forum he has posted an average of around 900 comments per month, or 45 per working day. If Kachiwachi worked for Logitech he would probably be as productive as a part time customer support agent!

If each customer problem takes an average of 2 posts to fix, then by my reckoning KachiWachi has helped around 20,000 logitech customers fix problems with their webcams, speakers, mice etc. I'd guess that Logitech might have expected to pay around $3-5 per contact if they had fixed those problems themselves, so, in effect Kachiwachi has single-handedly saved Logitech between $60-100k over the last few years (minus of course a share of their customer support forum build and run costs).

In addition, through his advice, Kachwach has most likely influenced the Loyalty of many of the Logitech customers that he has helped. We know from an abundance of research that customers who have a problem that is fixed to their satisfaction and more loyal in the long term than customers who never complain. Kachiwachi has also almost certainly driven several successful cross and up-sells on Logitech's behalf. I'm pretty sure that people trust his advice more than they do a corporate press release or product sales pitch.

It doesn't take many active contributors like Kachiwachi to build a successful customer-to-customer channel. The challenge is finding out what contributors perceive as important to engage their services. For some it's personal brand and status, others are product enthusiasts (like Apple or Harley Davison fanatics), others may want material rewards. If you can find out what customers and your contributors want to get out of their communities and forums, then you stand a chance of finding a Kachiwachi and building a vibrant community. For the moment though, let me add my Kudos to the 484 votes Kachiwachi has currently received!


Disclaimer and disclosure - I've never worked with either Logitech or Kachiwachi so the cost savings I reference are purely hypothetical. If either would like to be interviewed for a follow up piece though please feel free to get in contact! 

#VirginMedia - a customer’s perspective on Twitter service

Let me say from the outset that this is not a "Virgin Media lies Virgin Media sucks" post. I am a relatively happy Virgin Media customer and on balance I would recommend them to a friend; but my last customer service experience with them was mixed. I've chosen to case study the experience for precisely that reason. It's incredibly hard to create a good cross-channel, joined up customer service experience and get things right every time. Even the best companies struggle. Most organisations do some things well and some things badly. They are siloed, they fire-fight and they have done little more than dabble in social media. The purpose of this post is not to criticise Virgin Media, it's to highlight learning's from my recent dealing with them.

My experience with Virgin Media started when my broadband and cable TV went down. After 24 hours I called Virgin Media's help line. I hit their IVR, navigated the menu options to the technical support line, but just as I reached the end of the menu path my call was disconnected. I tried a further 4 times but was disconnected each time having spent around 4 minutes per call. Frustrated, I called again but this time I pressed random numbers on the IVR and I got through to an agent. The agent apologised and explained that there was maintenance going on in my area. He couldn't tell me when the maintenance would end but he offered to credit my account £10. Happy enough I hung up, but 24 hours later I still had no broadband. I used my iphone to check on Virgin Media's web site to see if there was a service update online but I couldn't find anything so I tweeted "#virginmedia broadband now down for 48 hrs. Disconnected from call centre IVR 5 times... #fail". To be honest I didn't expect a response to the tweet but within an hour I got a response. We exchanged messages and @virginmedia advised me that the maintenance affecting my broadband would continue for another 2 days; not great but at least I now had an answer. Sure enough, 2 days later my broadband was switched back on (co-incidentally, on the same day I received a marketing offer through my letterbox to sign up as a new customer to Virgin Media (!) I’ll leave Marketing, Sales and Service integration for another post!).

What do I take from this customer service experience?

The best service is no service

I don't know if the maintenance on my broadband was planned or unplanned. Either way, Virgin Media could have prevented my call. They could have written, e-mailed or sent me an SMS to let me know that maintenance was planned in my area before the event. Once a problem occurred, they could have identified accounts from the affected area and put a message onto their IVR or web site advising customers who called that they were currently experiencing problems that would be resolved in 72 hours and that they would be crediting £10 to all affected accounts. In some industries, consumer-to-consumer is becoming the best way to prevent service calls, with customer’s turning to support forums to fix their problems.

Multi-channel is dead; the challenge is cross channel

My experience with Virgin Media highlights the challenge that many organisations now face. I started my interaction in one channel (phone), shifted to another (online) and then another (Twitter). Customer's will increasingly look to switch channels at their convenience and expect to pick up processes where they left off. This challenge will only get tougher with the increasing emergence of social channels beyond the organisation’s formal control.

Customers don't mind self-service until it breaks

I have no problem with IVR technology per se, until it fails. I expect most customers feel the same. We now accept service automation but it has to be easy to use, crisis-proof and integrated into back up options. When Virgin Media's IVR failed, my call was disconnected; I couldn't navigate home and in the end I had to fool the IVR by selecting random options just so that I could speak to someone.

Technology doesn't build relationships; people do

When I eventually managed to speak to someone at Virgin Media they were both understanding and helpful. They didn't appear to be reading from a canned script, the agent seemed to be empowered to credit my account on the spot.

Expectations management should be ingrained across customer service

When the agent told me that maintenance was going on in my area he didn’t tell me how long it would continue, probably costing Virgin Media an unnecessary contact. My friend and colleague Reg Price nails this one. In his book Reliability Rules: How Promises Management Can Build Your Company Culture, Bid Your Brand, and Build Your Bottom Line, Reg lays out a comprehensive framework for setting and managing customer's expectations. 

Twitter is really starting to be a viable service channel and listening works

Virgin Media surprised me by listening to Twitter and offering to help. That unexpected surprise off-set the failings of some of their other channels which I think shows that Twitter is starting to become (at least in customers’ eyes) a viable service channel, however, I doubt this honeymoon period will last. Soon customers will expect organisations to adopt service channels that met their needs, whether that is Twitter or whatever social platform comes next.

Solid foundations

Perhaps above all, my experience with Virgin Media illustrates the importance of solid foundations for customer service. I admire Virgin Media for being an early adopter of Twitter for customer service, but, for me Twitter was a final resort, all other channels having failed.

Disclaimed and disclosure: I have never worked for or with Virgin Media. My only dealings with them have been as a customer.

Lean thinking in CRM and Social CRM

I first came across Lean thinking in CRM when I met with the COO of a large Dutch financial services company. At first I was sceptical, I had previously only associated Lean with Japanese automotive companies; particularly Toyota where the concept was created. But lights began to go on in my head when the COO described the application of Lean principles to customer-facing operations and I have been a fan of Lean CRM thinking ever since.


Lean thinking starts with the customer

With its supply chain origins, Lean stresses the importance of understanding customer demand, then "pulling" items through the supply chain. Any CRM initiative should start with the customer's value creation process, working out how mutual value can be created for both provider and consumer. Social CRM extends and accelerates our understanding of the customer by placing the customer in control of the conversation and connecting customer feedback (in the form of tweets, ideas, sentiment etc) directly with product development, marketing, sales and service.

Lean encourages customers to "pull" value themselves

Traditional CRM would see customer's "pulling" value as being self-service. Allowing customers to answer their own queries, place orders, track status etc on their own terms via the internet, SMS or via voice self-service. Again social CRM extends this principle, as it facilitates customer to customer collaboration. Customers participate in marketing, sales and service by creating content, answering questions, giving recommendations etc (see my post on "outsource your marketing, sales and service to your customers").

Lean eliminates waste

Lean works backwards tracking the value streams that enable customer value and eliminating waste. Toyota identified 7 waste types (overproduction, unnecessary transportation, inventory, motion, defects, over-processing, waiting). At first these all sound manufacturing-specific but think about the waste in front office operations, for example, a typical call centre. The call centre takes on too many agents for a peak period (over production), customers enter their account number on the IVR then again when the agent answers the call (over-processing), the first agent to speak to the customer can't answer the customer's problem (defects), the call is forwarded on to another agent and held in a queue (motion), the second agent asks for the customer's account number again… you get the idea. The same idea can also be applied to marketing (e.g. wasted spend on advertising) and sales (admin time versus productive time in front of the customer).

Lean focuses on standardising processes but allowing flexibility

The idea of Lean is to standardise processes, but not to straight-jacket an organisation so that it cannot respond to unexpected events. If you can standardise processes then people can perform multiple roles to maintain the "flow" of value to the customer. For example, consolidating down to one complaints process allows agents to deal with multiple complaints types, rather than having to learn a different process for each different complaint type. In this way, the organisation can flexibly respond to a sudden peak in a particular complaint type, rather than seeing one group's work load dramatically increase and stop the production line.

Lean drives a continuous improvement culture

One of the most important elements of a lean program is the creation of a continuous improvement culture. Lean is not a one-off initiative. Viewed this way it normally yields dramatic benefits for the first couple of months but then the organisation reverts to its pre-Lean state and the benefits fade quickly. All successful Lean programs place a huge amount of emphasis on cultural changes and working practices e.g. morning meetings.

Lean is typically technology-light

Most Lean purists would say that technology has no place in a Lean transformation. My own view is a little more pragmatic. Technology can help enable and facilitate Lean thinking through enhancing customer understanding (see my post on "customer listening mechanisms and Social CRM tools") and through enabling new business processes. Most CRM and Social CRM technology can be implemented in an Agile way which is strongly aligned to the continuous improvement / incremental element to Lean.

If you know of any good examples of organisations using Lean to drive their front office transformations please let me know.

For further reading on Lean I'd recommend Journey to Lean: Making Operational Change Stick by John Drew, Blair McCallum, and Stefan Roggenhofer.

Star Wars and Social CRM

The other day I was trying to explain to a client what social CRM was all about and what the difference was to the first generation of CRM. Knowing the client was a film-fanatic, I used a Star Wars analogy.

Despite the best of intentions first generation CRM systems were about technology-enabled command and control. Think of the Original Star Wars film, Darth Vader and the Death Star. As Supreme Commander of the Galactic Empire, Vader built the original Death Star to defeat rebel forces in the Galactic civil war. The Death Star was a monumental technological feat designed to control the Empire and attack the Rebels. Relating this to the first generation of CRM (the boom before the bust)

• First generation CRM systems were technology-centric monoliths
• They aimed to own and control all customer data and customer facing processes
• Marketers used this data to segment and bombard customers with spam
• Sales managers used this data to control sales reps
• Customer service managers used CRM to standardise and micro-manage agents

The first generation of CRM put powerful tools into dangerous hands resulting in many failed CRM initiatives and the CRM market going into the doldrums for several years (I likened this period to the start of "The Empire Strikes Back", when Darth Vader and the Galactic Empire had driven the Rebel Alliance into hiding on the remote ice planet Hoth.)

During the early years CRM had a fairly high failure rate (some analysts estimated 60-70%). Those projects that did succeed were small, agile and focussed on outcomes (like the x-Wing Falcons that attacked the first Death Star at the end of "Star Wars"… I realise I'm jumping around the Star Wars trilogy a little but bear with me!). The successful projects paid a great deal of attention to the customer experience, front line staff, incentives and culture. Typically they broke down the CRM vision into small digestible chunks and built incrementally.

Over time CRM bounced back. The industry made a mental shift from "Inside-Out" to "Outside-In", putting the customer back at the rightful heart of CRM programs and learning from previous failures (big-bang approaches, poorly aligned culture and incentives, lack of exec commitment etc). The industry woke up and started to get CRM right and companies started to reap tangible rewards for their investments. In "The Empire Strikes Back", Luke Skywalker's awakening began at Dagobah where Yoda introduced him to The Force an "omnipresent form of energy which can be harnessed by those with that ability…an energy field created by all living things that surrounds us, penetrates us and binds the galaxy together". The Force allows users to perform a variety of supernatural feats and can amplify certain physical traits.

Relating this to Social CRM, the Force is the sum of all customer comments, feedback, blogs, tweets, yelps, diggs and sentiment. Some organisations are able to tap into this using direct customer feedback to improve products and processes, drive customer word of mouth for marketing and customer collaboration for service. Those who do this well are able to achieve amazing feats - see my post on outsourcing your Marketing, Sales and Service to your customers. Social CRM is therefore a natural extension of CRM. It further energises the return of CRM by placing the customer not just in the centre but now in control of the conversation.

So when we get to "The Return of the Jedi", the final film in the original trilogy, Luke Skywalker is now a fully fledged Jedi Knight, the Ewoks lead the rebel fight and Lando Calrissian launches a final assault on the Death Star in the Millennium Falcon. In an ideal world, that would be the death of technology-centric, command and control CRM (the Rebel alliance would celebrate the fall of the Empire) , but I suspect things aren't quite that simple. The battle is far from won. The Force can be used for both good (Jedis) and evil (Siths). It amplifies the things that an organisation does well along with the things they do badly (see my post on 10 angry customer created sites and campaigns).

Some people think visually so here's a Prezi describing the above story. Enjoy and please let me know any feedback!

What would Google CRM look like?

A few years ago, when I was working for SAP, I posed a question to my team: "If Google were to launch a CRM solution, what would it look like and how would SAP respond both tactically and strategically"? I mocked up some fictitious "Google CRM" screenshots showing Google CRM mashed up with Google Docs, Google Adwords, Google Maps etc and I described the solution as a free CRM solution funded by advertising revenue that would shake up the CRM market.

The session promoted heated debate. Some ideas, like mashing SAP CRM screens with Google Maps were fed into SAP's CRM Product Development and were embraced into the product, others, like partnering with Google to create a SaaS solution, never left the room.

Skip forward a few years and last month I read Jeff Jarvis' book What Would Google Do? In the book, Jeff Jarvis takes his readers into the Google mindset, discussing the tactics that have made Google so groundbreaking. He then applies his framework of thoughts to other industries, asking how Google would approach running a cable company, a restaurant, an airline a hospital and many more. I found it an extremely well written and thought-provoking read.

So while the book was fresh in my memory I decided to revisit the question of "what would Google CRM look like"? Here are my hypotheses (all open to debate and comment!):

1.   It would be free (standard edition) or offered at a nominal per user per annum cost (premier edition). Google commodities' everything. They would provide basic CRM and Social CRM processes like Sales Force Automation, Campaign Management, Customer Service free of charge, powered by advertising revenue. Above a certain user number or storage capacity, they would offer a Premium Edition which might include additional functionality (for context Google Apps Premier Edition costs $50 per user per year).

2.   Google CRM would be integrated into all existing Google Tools & Apps for example:

a.  Google Docs - for word processing e.g. proposal generation, presentation and spreadsheets e.g. reporting

b.  Google Maps and Google Earth - for mapping customer, employee or site locations (most CRM solutions already do this)

c.   Google Adsense and Adwords - integrated into campaign management to allow closed loop creation of adword campaigns (Salesforce.com already have this functionality)

d.  Google Alerts - to alert customer facing staff of key information relating to their customers

e.  Google Sites and Google Checkout - for basic eCommerce functionality

3.   It would be platform based - Google would  allow developers to build out CRM and Social CRM functionality via Google App Engine, similar to Blogger where Google provides a basic blogging tool but allows the tool to be extended with third party widgets. In the current CRM world Salesforce.com's Force.com platform is the best comparison as it allows extensions to the Salesforce.com solution to be built and distributed on AppExchange. Google would release Google CRM in beta then let developers and early customers build it out.

4.   It would be communications-enabled throughout, with unified communications and presence. This is similar to SAP's concept of communications-enabled business processes with their Business Communications Management solution, but Google CRM would leverage all of Google's communications and multi-media collaboration capabilities:

a.  Google Wave for team room collaboration

b.  Google Talk for IP telephony

c.   Google Mail & Chat

d.  Blogger (internal and external blogs)

e.  Picassa & Youtube for multimedia file sharing (e.g. social sales scenarios)

f.   Google Reader for RSS subscriptions

g.  Nexus One and Android for mobile use

5.   Google would think distributed, doing what they do best and linking to the rest.  Unlike CRM solutions of the past they would not seek to master all customer data and processes. They would seek to index and organise customer information wherever it sits and guide users to the right answers through intelligent search.

6.   Google CRM would be insanely easy to use. Jeff Jarvis describes Google's approach as "Simplify, Simplify", a philosophy most CRM vendors could still learn a great deal from. Think iGoogle widgets, voice control, unified experience across multiple-devices.

7.   Google CRM would leverage the Wisdom of the crowd:

a.   Internally to improve system performance and suggestions. For example, Google CRM would self-optimise business processes based on usage and it would re-engineer under-used functions.

b.   It would facilitate internal social collaboration. Oracle's social tools like Sales Genius are probably the closest and best I have seen in this area allowing sales reps to find similar customers to sell to, and allowing customer-facing staff to tag useful collateral.

c.    Externally, Google CRM would favour peer-to peer above traditional CRM channels. It would provide customers with open, transparent information about what other customers were buying and what service issues existed. It would encourage peer-to-peer as a primary communications channel, allowing customers to talk to each other directly to review products, give recommendations and solve issues themselves via  crowd-service (see my post on outsourcing your marketing, sales and service to your customers).

8.   Finally, (and I acknowledge that this one may be optimistic…) I'd like to think that my fictitious Google CRM would prevent evil! Google captures a huge amount of information on users and is often accused of compromising privacy. However,  Jeff Jarvis talks about an invoice relationship between trust and control. Perhaps Google CRM would allow customers to maintain and control the information stored about them inside the system, giving them control what offers they receive and what their relationships look like. Doc Searls calls this VRM or the inverse of traditional CRM where the customer controls the conversation.

Disclaimer and disclosure: this post is purely hypothetical. I have no knowledge of Google considering, building or buying a CRM solution. I have no direct vested interests in Google or in any of the other software vendors mentioned.

Outsource your Marketing, Sales & Service to your customers

No - the title of this blog post is not a typo… nor am I suggesting you ask your customers to set up an offshore call centre in Mumbai... Some organisations have customers who are so passionate about their product or service that they do their marketing, their selling and their customer support on their behalf. Of course there's nothing new here. Word of mouth has been around as long as trade and commerce, but the internet has enabled connectivity and a network effect to drive scale like never before.

Let's take a practical example. A few months ago I had a problem with my iPod - the screen had frozen. I looked around for a reset button but couldn't find one. So what did I do? Phone Apple's call centre? Of course not, I Googled it. Someone called "Apple_Fanatic" had already posted instructions on how to reboot a frozen iPod in an online support forum. Apple had, in effect, outsourced the first line of their customer support to their customers.

Problem fixed, I then started reading other posts in the forum. Apple had just launched their 3GS iPhone. I'd heard that the 3GS had new video features and was supposedly faster but I hadn't been onto Apple's web site to tale a look at the new product. I was tempted to look into the 3GS but I also knew that the price was pretty high so I started to read the comments and reviews in the forum. Most were impressed with the video, but many questioned the level of improvement from the previous 3G model, especially since prices of the 3G had dropped considerably. As price was a more important factor to me than video recording or additional speed, I went onto a price comparison site, found the cheapest supplier (who was looking to off-load a bunch of 3G phones before the 3GS hit the high street) and I made my purchase. Once my 3G phone arrived I again Googled instructions on how to set it up, read reviews on the best Apps to download and I am now a happy and enthusiastic Apple customer.

It struck me recently that through my customer lifecycle with Apple I had actually had almost no direct interaction with Apple. I'd been into an Apple store once to see the 3GS iPhone working but my primary contacts had been through other Apple customers who had done Apple's marketing and service on Apple's behalf. You could argue that in this example, the outcome wasn't entirely positive for Apple as I purchased the old 3G phone rather than the new 3GS, however, that would be more then offset by my long term value to Apple.

Of course not every company has products like Apple's that are so good they drive passionate loyalty amongst their customers. But in many industries, companies are trying to establish peer to peer  (P2P) collaboration:

• Amazon.com has a policy of "The best customer service is no customer service". They probably led the way in establishing peer to peer collaboration with product reviews (despite a slight glitch in 2004 when many authors were exposed to have written glowing reviews of their own books!). Their customer service was famous for not publishing a phone number, instead, encouraging (or rather forcing) customers to self-serve. Early on they had their fair share of criticism for not having a large call centre (one angry blogger published their phone numbers ), but these days their customer service is pretty well regarded and most customer accept their online policy. I had a recent problem that was solved quickly and easily.
• NikeiD allows customers to design their own sports trainer, review other users designs and post reviews online.
• SAP has created a number of communities for Developers (SAP Developer Network), customers, analysts and consultants (BPX community) and for Business Objects customers (Business Objects Community). All offer a forum for members to exchange information, blog, collaborate etc. In total the sites have more than 1.3m members in 200 countries, generating around 6,000 posts per day.
• O2 have created a customer forum with the explicit aim of encouraging P2P service collaboration. The site currently has 75,000 members who have posted 186k comments.
• Salesforce.com set up IdeasExchange to allow their customers to suggest product improvements, then vote on suggested product enhancements. The same technology is also used by Starbucks and Dell to gather ideas from their customers.
• As a slightly different example, Innocentive allows both companies and individuals to leverage the wisdom of the crowd. Users submit problems they are facing along with a "challenge reward" to tempt people into submitting solutions.

In most of these examples it only takes a tiny % of contributors to make P2P collaboration work (only a tiny percentage of Wikipedia users contribute to the content).  The challenge is how to maintain participation and reward and motivate those who participate. Wikipedia was recently reported to be losing tens of thousands of volunteers per month.

If you know of any good crowd-service examples, in particular ones that reward participants, then please let me know.