ContactHelp Crowdsources Ways to Get On-Demand Tech Phone Support
by Sam Dean - May. 15, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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In a recent post I did on the WebWorkerDaily blog, called 5 Free Online Answer Sites for Tech Questions, I discussed places you can go online for getting tech questions answered, and readers added some useful ones to my list, including the impressive Stack Overflow site. (If you're an open source developer and you don't know about Stack Overflow, check it out.) As a follow-up to that post, I did this post on a company called ContactHelp. The site has a very interesting model for crowdsourcing advice on how to get effective tech support on the phone, and the way it works borrows crowdsourcing and community principles from the world of open source.
As I wrote in the post about ContactHelp:
"If ContactHelp just provided support phone numbers, it would be only mildly more useful than simply Googling for numbers, but the site goes well beyond that. It’s designed to allow users to add tips on how to get support efficiently; supplies hours of operation for most support centers listed; often provides support e-mail addresses and, in many cases, describes how to get support in multiple languages."
The tips that community members provide at ContactHelp are surprisingly good. If you have a question about a Sony digital imaging product, the site has the exact right phone number and the community says this about quickly getting a live support tech on the phone:
"How to reach a live person: Keep pressing 0 (3 times) and ignore the error messages.”
In other cases, users have posted similar tips such as: “Keep pressing # and ignore their messages until they say ‘Sorry but I’m having trouble helping you’ and then you’ll be transferred.” The site is also very good at providing advice on how to get real people on the phone at the many e-commerce sites that seem to deliberately make it hard to track down phone support.
ContactHelp isn't pure open source, but it does quite an impressive job of coaxing solid crowdsourced tips on tech support from an experienced group. Users in the community can even upload recordings of notably unhelpful support calls. If you've ever been caught in one of those infuriating voice navigation loops when seeking support, check it out. There's more about ContactHelp on WebWorkerDaily.
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