BT Hubbub - Tapping into the wisdom of crowds

The connected nature of our society enables large numbers of people to contribute their minds to solving challenges, and collectively arrive at much better solutions.

The concept of bringing expertise together online to solve problems is increasingly being pushed into new challenges as we enter the so-called web 2.0 era.

Hubbub is an online community launched by BT to support users of BT services. It taps into knowledge shared by ordinary BT customers participating in an online community, helping new visitors arrive at a solution to technical issues quickly and without fuss, and complementing established support structures such as helpdesks.

Many expert users participate in the Hubbub customer community . They are able to draw on their personal experiences of BT device and service configuration to provide pointers to users who are facing similar issues.

Contributions can include incredibly detailed instructions authored by leading edge users who simply want to help others out and increase their online status while doing so.

However, just as important are the non-technical users who are able to record issues in their own words, and help BT to establish a picture of configuration issues from the ordinary customer’s point of view.

Either way, Hubbub enables both BT customers and BT to benefit.

Sharing knowledge

The Hubbub project has been led inside BT by principal research scientist Cefn Hoile.

To establish a broad, inclusive community, a new form of online forum was built which eliminates many of the hurdles which prevent ordinary customers from engaging in a technical discussion community.

The approach originated from prototyping work undertaken by Cefn at MIT in Boston, USA, stimulated by study programmes and ongoing research concerning online social dynamics and the navigation of complex knowledge bases from Professors Judith Donath, Alex Pentland and Marvin Minsky.

He says: "We started by trying to build a help system that would anticipate BT’s needs for a single point of access to knowledge across multiple products and services, thinking several years out. However, it immediately found a home with the Broadband Talk team, who were looking for something just like this. Most forums are challenging to say the least for users without a technical background - exactly the people who face problems when setting up new technology".

Once Cefn had secured support for the concept, an agile team was created, sponsored by the Customer Services and Systems Venture, including web designers, developers, security specialists and project managers to support Cefn in delivering a functional site in a matter of weeks.

"Unlike existing forums, with Hubbub there is no expectation that the user understands how a forum works," says Cefn. "In fact you begin not knowing you are using a forum at all - it is simply asking a question. It is about trying to connect together people through the information they already have access to. If we are going to migrate people away from calling the existing call centres we need to make the forum journey super easy for them."

The evolutionary nature of Hubbub also helps BT in the longer term. Hoile adds: “Product managers, designers and marketers are able to observe customers talking freely about their experiences. This then feeds into the long loop response of redesign and improving the product and marketing materials based on a better understanding the customer experience.

"This qualitative information about what people are actually saying is typically fielded by the call centre and may not reach the rest of the organisation. Hubbub can bring them into the loop."

Even call centre agents are able to use the system to improve their own knowledge when handling customer queries. In just a few months Hubbub is already serving 600,000 pages a month, to an estimated 4,300 users each day. The success of Hubbub has meant in a very short time it has pushed its way into contention for a broader rollout to reduce the load on BT’s call centres.

"However taking the innovative idea of a BT researcher at MIT to a beta release of software in a few weeks, would not have been possible without the belief of BT Retail's consumer business executives who were able to foresee the possibilities immediately," adds Jeff Patmore, head of BT’s University Research.

Proof that what the web 2.0 era represents is the opportunity to gain significant business benefits in a short space of time. In the case of Hubbub, all achieved by innovatively combining web technology with the basic concept that finding a needle in a haystack becomes significantly easier if you put 1,000 people on the job.