At the beginning of the semester, I started working at the CIT HelpDesk as a consultant. There are a handful of us who work together, and trust is very important. We need to trust each other, and customers need to trust us. We rely on each other's expertise when it comes to troubleshooting, so we need to know that the person we asks is knowledgeable. Even more important, the users who call us need to know that we can be trusted. They are often novice computer users, and they rely solely on what we tell them. They need to know that we are competent and can solve their issues with minimal headache. The current system we use amongst ourselves is very informal. We have mostly learned who knows what, and we have built up a trust through repeated interactions with each other.
There are several desired behaviors that could be used as inputs for a reputation system. We want all of us to be accurate (obviously). We need to know how to solve the problem. We also need to be good communicators, as sometimes the users who call are far from experts. Consistency is also very important. Our work will be much more efficient if we give uniform answers and each consultant is as well-trained as the others.
These behaviors can be (and are) overseen by our supervisors. They pay attention and note how successful we are. They have various ways to measure who is sharp, and who isn't performing as well as they could be. Also, some callers are asked to give feedback and rate how effective the consultant they talked to was. If we perform well, we can receive a raise or a promotion. Also, not as tangibly, the consultants with more expertise definitely earn the respect of the rest of us, and we are willing to defer to them because they are trusted.
The system could be beaten, but it would take a lot of effort. For example, we could get friends to call up with easy to fix problems, and it would seem like we solved every case we encountered. We could appear smarter by to callers by giving an overly complex solution to their problem...but I doubt that would make them as happy as a simple fix would. For the most part though, we learn from each other and help each other out. We're more concerned with appearing reputable to callers, and there is little incentive to "cheat" to better yourself, especially since it requires more effort to game the system than to just do good work. By doing a quality job helping users, the supervisors will notice and your reputation will rise.
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This is an interesting system in place that makes perfect sense for rating the effectiveness of consultants at CIT. It's easy to see how trust becomes an important part of such a group when you need to rely on one another for expertise that might not be universal. The rewards system does seems somewhat subjective, but as I do not know everything about it that could just be my point of view after reading this. It seems like a lot of trust and reputation is given to the supervisors in trusting them to make honest and fair decisions on the quality of the consultant, but at the same time this is probably a good thing.
ReplyDeleteI worked as a consultant for the Engineering College's computer network for 2 years, and I can definitely attest to what you wrote here. Although a lot of the people I worked with were all very smart and talented, the skills were also so diverse and a lot of times there wasn't even much overlap. Therefore, answering questions and solving problems was possibly MORE about knowing who to ask when you don't know rather than actually having skills yourself. Although the rewards system does seem a bit subjective, it probably is a pretty good measure, but I wonder if there are more automated ways that you can measure how good someone is doing (like by analyzing their language or something)
ReplyDeleteI agree your observation that it is necessary to be "more concerned with appearing reputable to callers" for there to be little incentive to "cheat to better yourself". In many of these reputation systems it is largely about the focus of the participants to determine the success of the reputation systems. Perhaps, their attitudes will might fit even better their behaviors if they have some vested interest in it such as raises or promotions.
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