FOR the past decade, technical support has been in the vanguard of globalisation. With the costs of intercontinental communication shrivelling to virtually nothing, phone and online customer services have migrated to wherever they can be managed most efficiently and cheaply. India blazed the trail, building a $5 billion outsourcing business on helping Westerners solve high-tech niggles. Recently, the Philippines has taken over as the world's call-centre hotspot, offering comparable wage costs to India, with the added benefit—at least to North American ears—of a Yankee drawl. But even as half a million Filipino customer-service representatives urge callers to have a nice day, they may want to peer over their shoulders. Some of the biggest brands in software, consumer electronics and telecoms have now found a workforce offering expert advice at a fraction of the price of even the cheapest developing nation, who also speak the same language as their customers, and not just in the purely linguistic sense. Because it is their customers themselves. "Unsourcing", as the new trend has been dubbed, involves companies setting up online communities to enable peer-to-peer support among users. Instead of speaking with a faceless person thousands of miles away, customers' problems are answered by individuals in the same country who have bought and used the same products. This happens either on the company's own website or on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and the helpers are generally not paid anything for their efforts.

As might be imagined, the savings can be considerable. Gartner, the research company, estimates that using communities to solve support issues can reduce costs by up to 50%. When TomTom, a maker of satellite-navigation systems, switched on social support, members handled 20,000 cases in its first two weeks and saved it around $150,000. Best Buy, an American gadget retailer, values its 600,000 users at $5m annually.

To motivate members to participate, Lithium, a software company that provided TomTom's and Best Buy's systems, turns the whole thing into a game. Such "gamification", increasingly ubiquitous in areas ranging from self-improvement to project management, works by awarding "kudos" points for a helpful answer, allowing helpers to "level up". This boosts their status and often comes with a jokey honorific. Solve enough problems and you might eventually become a "super fan", in the top 0.5% of responders.

Companies prize such fans especially highly because they account for a disproportionate number of responses. In the case of Lenovo's support network for its personal computers, a mere 30 super fans have generated nearly half of the 1,200 accepted solutions. A single super fan in the Logitech network, code-named KachiWachi, has posted over 45,000 responses related to the company's webcams.

One British company has taken unsourcing to the extreme. GiffGaff, a virtual mobile operator (ie, one which piggybacks on traditional network operators' infrastructure), not only encourages clients to help each other out but also to recruit new customers and even promote the firm via home-made YouTube adverts. Unlike most companies, GiffGaff rewards participants with points that can reduce their monthly phone bills. The system seems to work: GiffGaff says the average response time for questions is just three minutes, day or night, with 95% of queries being answered within an hour.

There are limits to the scope of unsourcing, however. Some of the issues frustrate customers most, such as billing errors, have to be dealt with by someone with access to confidential customer data. Rolling out fully fledged customer-generated support to health, government and banking industries could also face legal and regulatory hurdles. Moreover, Gartner warns that unsuccessful deployments risk a tidal wave of criticism on social networks. It expects customer satisfaction to fall in 70% of organisations shifting support functions over to users in the next two years.

Despite this, the prospect of halving support costs is likely to prove tempting for many companies. They might also hope that it will be harder for customers to vent their ire when its focus is not half a world away, but possibly right next door.