What if you could make each of your user’s knowledge available to all other users exactly when they needed it?

You’d have a vast network that essentially functions like a neural network — a giant brain containing the sum of all knowledge about your product — that your customers could tap on demand exactly exactly when they need it.

The potential of this kind of collective intelligence in business has been over promised for years. Now, however, it’s making rapid inroads to practical applications in customer service.

At Oracle OpenWorld this week, I teamed up with Robinson O’Brien-Bours, director of support at the innovative wireless company FreedomPop, to demonstrate how FreedomPop is using Directly to let customers tap the collective intelligence of its most experienced users on demand.

O’Brien-Bours discussed how Directly plugs into FreedomPop’s Oracle Service Cloud and analyzes tickets, sends qualified tickets to his most knowledgable users and pays them for fast, verified answers.

He also shared Freedom Pop’s success metrics over the past month, including 16 minute response time and 92% customer satisfaction and 30 percent cost savings per case.

In a live demo, we showed a FreedomPop customer question automatically route to a FreedomPop expert using the same kind of phone. The expert answered the question instantly using his own knowledge, unlike an agent who typically takes longer and has to look up the answer in a knowledgebase.

The FreedomPop demo illustrated what Jeff Wartgow, director of product management at Oracle, describes as the shift from knowledge-supported to knowledge-driven customer service.

The difference, as Wartgow describes it, is that instead of people being supported by knowledge, knowledge is supported by people.

What does that mean? Instead of calling customer service agent who is backed by a knowledge base, people tend to plug into a vast network of knowledge, inside and outside the company, first and only contact customer service if they can’t find what they want.

In these cases, taking advantage of the collective intelligence of your expert users has been a goal for years.

What’s different is that now, for the first time, you can tap that knowledge in a structured way that services your customers exactly when they want it.