Hugh Pickens on Slashdot writes:
"The NY Times writes about Justin McMurry of Keller, TX, who spends up to 20 unpaid hours per week helping Verizon customers with high-speed fiber optic Internet, television and telephone service. McMurry is part of an emerging corps of Web-savvy helpers that large corporations, start-up companies, and venture capitalists are betting will transform the field of customer service. Such enthusiasts are known as lead users, or super-users, and their role in contributing innovations to product development and improvement — often selflessly — has been closely researched in recent years. These unpaid contributors, it seems, are motivated mainly by a payoff in enjoyment and respect among their peers. ‘You have to make an environment that attracts the Justin McMurrys of the world, because that’s where the magic happens,’ says Mark Studness, director of e-commerce at Verizon. The mentality of super-users in online customer-service communities is similar to that of devout gamers, according to Lyle Fong, co-founder of Lithium Technologies whose web site advertises that a vibrant community can easily save a company millions of dollars per year in deflected support calls’ and whose current roster of 125 clients includes AT&T, BT, iRobot, Linksys, Best Buy, and Nintendo. Lithium’s customer service sites for companies offer elaborate rating systems for contributors, with ranks, badges and kudos counts. ‘That alone is addictive,’ says Fong. ‘They are revered by their peers.’ Meanwhile McMurry, who is 68 and a retired software engineer, continues supplying answers by the bushel, all at no pay. ‘People seem to like most of what I say online, and I like doing it.’"
This is not new, in fact the foundation of Internet collaboration was laid through such online communities who used to answer all your queries on operating systems, drivers, browsers and how to’s of fixing software usage and issues.
The availability platforms for creating online communities makes life much more simple. WordPress, Drupal and Dotnetnuke are few such platform, that you can count on and deployment is really a breeze.
It’s not that these communities are working in islands and businesses are not taking a note of it. Besides Lithium mentioned in the article, getSatisfaction is one more such example of people powered customer support and then there are companies like HP driving the global online customer support community initiative on their own. Even social networks like facebook and twitter make good platform for offering customer service and support and where customers help customers.
Recommended:
[pdf] Online Customer Support Communities – Customer helping customers – Top 10 Rules and the best practices followed by successful companies
[pdf] Turning Love into Money: How some firms may profit from voluntary electronic customer communities, 2001 but old is gold 
