A friend of mine works for a new startup called HiveLive, so I decided to do a bit of research into the company and its offerings.  All I can say is … wow. The concept is extremely interesting.  By combining social networking with business, the organization appears to be on the verge of a new customer focused application. Their technology builds off of the normal social applications of blogs, wikis, forums and profiles.  The expansions that they offer allow users to create “Hives”, a sort of locked grouping to a set of users for a specific project or application.  Hives, as defined by their website, are “[f]lexible building blocks (Hives) that can be easily configured for story telling (blog-ing), transactional discussions (forum-ing), group editing (wiki-ing), FAQs, knowledge management, file and media sharing, and much more.”

Although I haven’t, personally, had the pleasure of seeing exactly how it works, I can imagine how this would allow a contact center or a customer focused organization to truly have an impact by fostering a customer, employee and partner development.

Think about the following:

 Company A has a customer service center that offers self-service technology, email support, chat availability, and phone contact.  By adding HiveLive’s LiveConnect Community Platform, an organization can thereby develop a more intense, more focused, and more customized solution. 

• Does the company have a set of high profile customers? Give them their own Hive — restricted access to some of the top client minds at the organization;
• Does the company offer different technology solutions?  Each solution can have its own Hive to be in tune with the quality engineers of that technology and the community can help itself.

 Both of these solutions take inbound calls off of the company’s service center and help drive towards self-service and community-servicing groups. 

 The company’s had some excellent funding, so they’re definitely an organization to watch over the next few years.  Adapting their technology and offering to your call center may be a very strong way to build communities for your customers’, and in conjunction your own, benefit.

As they say ….

• Customer Communities…that increase brand loyalty
• Employee Communities…that increase organizational intelligence and innovation
• Partner Communities…that align goals and increase revenue

Sounds good to me!

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