The phenomenon of P3 community for IT support: a crowd-support case study

Organisations are increasingly considering the establishment of virtual peer-to-peer problem solving (P3) communities as a channel to provide support services to their customers. Such service support models promise organisations benefits over traditional models but there are uncertainties around their success due to the possible risks and negative outcomes. There is a scarcity of studies that empirically investigate the risks and negative outcomes of P3 adoption initiatives. This case study of an established P3 community, Telstra's CrowdSupport, provides some preliminary evidence of the extent of penetration of such initiatives as well as some of the pitfalls, e.g. Public airing of complaints. The discussion highlights the innovative integration of crowd, cloud, social and gaming elements and calls for further research into the P3 adoption-decision, community member motivation and engagement.