Not everything can be automated. Sorry, it’s just not possible. We expect contact center agents, not a software application , to sort out a misplaced delivery order. There’s an interesting computing trend called crowdsourcing that taps into the unique skills of real people. Turning the human-versus-computer relationship on its head, crowdsourcing uses software to organize human problem solvers to take on tasks too difficult for silicon. Think of it as an on-demand contact center that matches customers with a virtual expert community.

In my last post, I mentioned that Amazon has developed a kind of distributed contact center technology. Known as Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s software allows companies to divvy up work among hundreds of human agents (the crowd), collect the results, and return the answers to an existing business workflow.

Amazon developed Mechanical Turk to solve its own internal, CPU-thrashing task: finding and eliminating duplicate product descriptions in its vast web site. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, said that existing Amazon software could algorithmically get very close without being completely certain that it had identified a match. With Mechanical Turk, a real person – not a software subroutine – is called upon to close the gap.

In reality, a request for help, known as a Human Intelligence Task or HIT, is posted on a web site. Humans do the analysis of the multiple descriptions, entering their yes or no responses into a web form that’s read by the software.

Mechanical Turk has obvious applications for audio transcription services (legal industry), copy editing (publishing), debugging (software), and photographic analysis. On that last point, Mechanical Turk was used to help in the search for Steve Fosset’s missing plane.

Amazon has made its software relatively easy to use. But businesses that want to take the plunge and rely on anonymous workers — and yes, they do get paid on a piecemeal basis to solve HITs —will have to factor in practical challenges such as the qualifications and skill-levels of these workers.

What about bringing this dynamic crowdsourcing idea into a company, where the workforce is a known quantity, and letting employees take on the role of the crowd?

This approach is similar in spirit to the freewheeling collaboration that we all do as part of our jobs. Crowdsourcing software, like Mechanical Turk, is simply better at organizing and allocating assignments and, perhaps, opening up the problem-solving discussion to employees who are outside the usual loops.

With “inhouse crowdsourcing,” the company as a whole becomes an intellectual resource – a pool of subject matter experts that can be tapped into to solve both short-term emergencies and long-term strategic issues. It truly extends the contact center request-response model beyond the contact center, making us all agents—at least part of the time.