On May 17 at Permissionless, the largest ever DeFi conference, Consensys announced the latest step in its strategy of contributing to a global paradigm shift towards Web3 technologies: VillageDAO. 

Built jointly with LivePerson, a global leader in conversational artificial intelligence (AI), VillageDAO will help Web3 brands decentralize customer care by harnessing the power of their communities. Users of all kinds of products and services will be empowered and rewarded for helping other users resolve their issues, representing a new model for customer success that places community at its core. This follows last year’s announcement of our collaboration with LivePerson that further empowers MetaMask users to get support at the moment they need it through LivePerson's Conversational AI.

Why VillageDAO?

Progress relies on our ability to challenge established ways of working and improve on them; VillageDAO is precisely such an attempt.

Currently, most organizations – regardless of the product or service they offer – maintain some form of customer success department. Their objectives are numerous, and can include resolving customers’ issues, maximizing customer satisfaction, and supporting the brand’s reputation, among others. This same assumption generally holds true for many organizations in Web3. Many thousands of people and billions of dollars are devoted, globally, to supporting and improving customer experiences.

Scaling customer success, however, is difficult. Faced with high volumes, an organization’s customer success may be unable to respond quickly to everyone, leaving users frustrated. Many Web3 organizations in particular rely on community-oriented success practices in Discord, Telegram, or Twitter. Whilst they encourage engagement, these platforms can result in unaddressed customer issues, particularly in times of high demand. 

VillageDAO will address these problems: as a purpose-built customer success community, it will combine the community-centric ethos of Web3 with the systematic approach that many organizations’ customer success departments practice. 

How Does it Work?

VillageDAO will allow participating organizations to unlock the knowledge and enthusiasm of their power users by incentivizing them to assist other users with their queries. Make sense? Let’s cover the basics.

Supporting the Village: Experts and Tickets

Let’s say you, a villager (a VillageDAO user) have an issue with a decentralized application (dapp), and you want to use the platform to get trustworthy, prompt support. To do so, you’d simply head to the web app and submit a ticket in the dapp’s village – their dedicated channel on the platform. 

This is where the experts come in. Say you fancy yourself a knowledgeable user of your favorite dapp; maybe you already help others on Reddit or Discord in your own spare time? If this sounds accurate, you’d be a prime candidate to become an expert.

You will be able to get started as an expert by providing a few basic details in a sign-up form. From there, experts become part of a Discord channel for the brand (product, service, dapp, etc.) that they’ve chosen to support. Notifications both via email and from the VillageDAO platform itself inform experts of new user tickets that they can choose to pick up and solve.

Once an expert takes responsibility for a ticket, they get in touch with the user through the VillageDAO web app and help out. 

Experts will be periodically rewarded for their support through a points-based reputation system. We’ll expand on this in a future article!

Partnering Up

Naturally, VillageDAO needs partner brands to get involved for the platform to be active and fulfill its mission. 

The method through which brands get a place on the platform is still being determined. And, in a fashion that truly lives up to the Age of Community billing, we’ll be partnering directly with certain brands to collaboratively design and finalize the platform’s membership and reward system. These brands will be known as design partners (DPs) and will be able to help shape the platform alongside our teams.

…and that’s it. Well, mostly. There are, of course, a range of other mechanisms, such as governance and expert reputation, that will underpin the DAO. We’ll cover those in future installments of this series, but we hope this gives you a good overview to start with.

Decentralized, Delegated, and Direct: The Benefits of VillageDAO

In addition to the overarching goal of modernizing through an innovative, Web3-native platform, VillageDAO will also bring concrete benefits for users, communities, and partner brands:

  • Scalability: Brands can quickly mobilize existing knowledge within their communities

  • Community: Enhancing engagement through peer-to-peer knowledge sharing leverages a key benefit of Web3

  • Self-sustaining: Incentives, bonding, reputation, and more mean the platform can sustain itself with relatively low time and resource commitments by brands

  • Trust and safety: Experts are incentivized to act in good faith through verification and public-facing reputation scores which directly impact rewards.

Interested in getting your brand a place on VillageDAO? Get in touch here. 

Keen to try out the platform as an expert? Sign up here.

This article is the first in our It Takes a Village series, where we distill the key features and concepts behind VillageDAO. Follow us on Twitter to catch future installments.