Blockchain technology company ConsenSys revealed its plans to create VillageDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) that will provide customer care services to other web3 projects – with the first client being Metamask, its own blockchain wallet.
To provide customer support at scale, ConsenSys has partnered with LivePerson, a US-based company focused on conversational AI. While AI will play a role, VillageDAO community members will be incentivized to contribute to the platform and its clients.
Arguably the most important part of the project – the incentive structure – is still being finalized. “There are versions of this that could make a ton of sense and other versions that would be destined for failure,” wrote Jon Hillis, founder of Cabin, a DAO building a decentralized city.
As ConsenSys notes, many web3 brands simply do not have the money or manpower to scale to grow their customer support base. VillageDAO hopes to grow a team of DAO contributors from across the globe.
To train DAO participants, ConsenSys Global PR Lead Elo Gimenez told The Defiant that the MetaMask customer success team will “provide an extensive onboarding to new experts [and] provide best practices for brands who choose to integrate with the VillageDAO platform.”
Scaling Challenges
As web3 companies and their user bases scale, customer service often becomes an increasingly important issue.Outside of web3, customers are used to dealing with professional customer service whether it is AI chatbots or real people.
But, blockchain technology is incredibly complex and constantly evolving.Few people are truly qualified to help solve blockchain-related issues, which often results in frustrated users left seeking answers.
By onboarding crypto-natives as VillageDAO contributors, ConsenSys is betting that crypto-natives are the best people to help other crypto-natives.Their vision is certainly backed up by the fact MetaMask has 30M users and an active community forum full of questions and answers by others experienced with crypto.
Through financial incentives and structuring the project as a DAO, ConsenSys and VillageDAO aim to recruit talented, hardworking crypto-natives to provide customer support for MetaMask users and other future web3 clients.
If VillageDAO works, the experiment can benefit all of web3 – for web2 businesses, a better customer experience usually leads to more users.
Web3 shouldn’t be any different.
