After class 14’s discussion about outsourcing, I decided to uncover other sources of customer service. In class, we were shown how outsourcing to India has its benefits of providing jobs, but at customers’ dismay. We were shown how call centres received a lot of stress from frustrated and impatient customers. With technological improvements, there are alternative ways to provide more efficient and reliable customer service. An example of this is unsourcing, which is peer-to-peer support among users on online communities set up by companies. Rather than waiting on the phone-line for an hour to talk to a faceless person miles away, customers’ problems and inquiries can be answered by other customers who have purchased the same products. Online communities include social networks like Facebook or on the company’s website. Unsourcing saves the time of customers when they only have a simple question, and research company, Gartner, estimates that using online communities to resolve customers’ issues can reduce costs by up to 50%. Best Buy’s community saves the company $5m annually with its 600,000 users. The drawbacks of unsourcing includes the inability to deal with private issues like billing errors, and once again minimizes the already limited jobs in developing countries.