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Almost any company that sells goods and services
to consumers-and to a certain extent, that sells
to businesses-spends a substantial amount of
time, money, and corporate resources providing
technical support. It need not be a computer or
software company. Even people who buy washing
machines or CD players or lamps run into
problems with the products and need help.
Providing excellent technical
support, especially for companies that need to
reach a large number of people, can be an
exceedingly expensive proposition. Typically,
technical support is provided via the telephone,
sometimes using toll-free 800 phone numbers. The
cost of hiring and staffing support lines, as
well as paying for telecommunications costs, can
be staggeringly high.
An intranet can help cut those
costs. Instead of having to staff many expensive
support lines, a company can instead create a
public Web site that people can visit. This Web
site can contain an enormous amount of technical
support information-everything from answers to
common problems, to downloadable software to fix
problems with hardware, to links to access
user-to-user forums where people can exchange
answers they've found to common problems.
In the next illustration,
we'll return to our imaginary company,
CyberMusic, and see how they use their intranet
to help provide technical support to their
customers.
When companies provide
technical support using Internet and intranet
technology, much of what they do is posted
outside the corporate firewall, on the Internet.
A variety of material can be posted. For
example, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) can
be posted-answers to the most common technical
problems. A database of problems and their
answers can be searched directly from the Web,
using the Common Gateway Interface. Public
discussion areas can be set up, where people
post their problems, and technical support
personnel can answer. And other customers can
answer the questions as well. If the product is
related to hardware or software, patches to the
software can be posted that can be downloaded to
solve technical problems. Another bonus in using
Web sites to provide technical support is that
the company can get people to fill in their
names, addresses, and other information-a way of
gathering customer names.
While much of what is posted
is outside the corporate firewall on the
Internet, what goes on inside the firewall on
the intranet is still used in a variety of ways
to help provide technical support. The databases
that are posted on the Internet, for example,
are first created on the intranet, and then
exported to the Internet. E-mail sent to the
technical support department must pass through
the corporate firewall from the Internet. And
when someone registers to receive technical
support, the information from the person is sent
in a secure fashion back through the firewall
into the Intranet. There, it will be put into a
corporate customer database, so that the company
can, for example, send out direct mail to all
its customers.
For companies that sell goods
and services to the consumer market, providing
technical support can be an expensive,
time-consuming chore. Using a combination of a
company's intranet and the Internet, technical
support costs can be cut dramatically, and
better technical support can be delivered. This
illustration shows how our imaginary company
CyberMusic uses them to provide technical
support. CyberMusic manufactures CD players as
well as publishes and sells records, so this
page shows how they provide technical support
for both lines of products.
- CyberMusic creates a public
Web site for technical support that anyone can
access over the Internet. They publicize the
site in their product literature, in their
advertising, and even when people call into
their technical support lines, a recorded
message suggests that people access the Web
site to get immediate technical support. The
Web site is located on a bastion host outside
the CyberMusic intranet, and is separated from
it by a filtering router. The bastion host and
the filtering routers are part of the firewall
that protects CyberMusic's intranet from the
Internet.
- CyberMusic has found
through the years that only 10 or 12 common
problems cause 80 percent of the calls to
their technical support phone lines-and these
are problems that can be solved quite simply.
(For example, a surprising number of people
simply forget to plug in the power cord of
their CD player.) So CyberMusic posts the
problems and answers to them in FAQs on their
Web site. This cuts down tremendously on calls
to their technical support line.
- Not all problems can be
solved by reading the FAQs. So CyberMusic uses
several other techniques for providing
technical support. The company creates a
database of common problems and solutions that
can be searched via the Web using the Common
Gateway Interface. A CGI program takes the
user's question, formulates it as a query for
the database, submits it, and returns the
result of the query in an HTML formatted page.
- Sometimes the best
technical support is provided by people, not
FAQs and databases. So CyberMusic has created
a number of discussion areas where people can
ask questions about their problems, and where
CyberMusic technical support professionals can
answer the questions. In yet other technical
support areas, customers can answer each
other's questions. These areas are set up as
USENET newsgroups, accessible via browsers
such as Netscape Navigator and Microsoft's
Explorer.
- The company also provides a
"mailto" link on the technical support page
that when clicked on launches an e-mail
program in the customer's browser, with the
e-mail address of the technical support staff
already filled in. The person can now type in
a question, and the e-mail will be sent
through the Internet, through the CyberMusic
firewall, and then to the technical support
department. Once there, a technical support
manager uses groupware to route the request to
the proper person, and uses the tracking
features of groupware to see that the question
is answered.
- CyberMusic CD's contain
more than just musical information on
them-they can also be read by a computer and
contain interviews and interactive articles
about the musicians and other information.
CyberMusic has found, however, that some
computers have trouble reading the CD's. To
solve the problem, they make available special
drivers and patches for those computers. The
drivers and patches can be downloaded directly
from the Web site on the bastion host. This
saves CyberMusic a great deal of money in
processing, handling, and mailing costs.
- CyberMusic, like many
companies that sell products to consumers,
tries to maintain as comprehensive a list as
possible of people who have purchased their
products. Most people, however, don't send in
reply forms, and so the number of customer
names and addresses they have is quite small.
CyberMusic uses its Web site to get many more
names. One way to get names is to have people
type in their name, address, and other
information before they can get to a certain
area of the Web site-for example, to the
discussions or to download patches. Another
way is to sponsor contests on the site, such
as giving away CD players and records. When a
name and address are typed into a Web form,
the data is sent through CyberMusic's firewall
to its intranet. It's then put in a customer
database, where CyberMusic can use it for
customer mailings.
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