upport phone call altogether. And the new vehicle for delivering that knowledge is -- you guessed it -- the Web.
"Call-avoidance programs such as our Web Advisor and Knowledge Builder won't solve every problem out there," says Keith Loris, vice president of development at ServiceSoft (Needham, MA), which recently released its first authoring tools for building Web-based problem-solving systems. "But they can reduce the number of phone calls a technical-support department has to handle. They can also ensure that the answers users get are consistent."
Some call-avoidance software goes a step beyond telling users how to fix a problem: Instead, the program fixes the problem automatically. For example, SystemWizard, from SystemSoft (Natick, MA), will detect, diagnose, and, in some cases, automatically fix common PC problems. SystemWizard, which should start appearing in several vendors' Win 95 and NT PCs by the end of this year, comprises several components, incl
uding a client application with a built-in local knowledge base of problem/resolution data, a server that provides a second level of support, and a knowledge builder for use by a PC vendor or MIS department to add solutions as new problems occur. If SystemWizard doesn't find a solution in the local database, the program can dial up a server, either over the Internet or the phone lines. The server can also automatically fix the problem by downloading a software solution or making some other modification.
By including a prebuilt database of solutions in SystemWizard, SystemSoft also eliminates a potential drawback to expert systems: the amount of time required for an organization to develop a comprehensive help system.
"Authoring is clearly the biggest issue," says Keith Sturdivant, manager of advanced support technology at Microsoft, which is increasing the number of self-help solutions it puts on the Web. "Maintaining the content and ensuring that the information is accurate and current in the databas
e is important. And if you have a broad range of issues to address, as we do at Microsoft, that becomes much harder to deal with."
One difficulty is that technical-support people are often too busy solving the latest customer problem to sit down for half a day or even an hour to get information out of their brain and into the expert system. Writing a self-help program that solves problems for people who have little or no inkling about what is causing their technical difficulties still involves extensive work, even when using authoring tools that require little or no programming.
"Providing a solution for a user who doesn't have any idea what's wrong requires pretty intense authoring," says Erik Stackhouse, technical-support representative at Internet service provider UltraNet (Marlboro, MA), which is currently developing solutions using authoring products from ServiceSoft. "In that situation, you have to ask the user a
lot of questions
. There are so many factors involved that, fr
om an authoring standpoint, it might be more work than it's worth." This is why companies such as UltraNet often start with a self-help system that specifically addresses a subset of common problems that can be easily solved, usually by an intermediate or advanced user. Situations involving more complex questions, novice users, or a computer that can't even get onto the Net will still require a voice call.
But even if the first implementations of Web-based self-help systems divert only 20 percent of incoming tech-support calls, this would be a huge improvement. And many vendors say that after an initial pilot phase, they plan to roll out larger, more comprehensive applications that will eventually handle 50 percent or more of incoming calls. In those situations, it's critical that call-avoidance authoring tools be able to integrate with legacy problem/resolution databases and call-tracking programs. And here the Web may again play an important role. A browser can be a single access point to a myriad of da
ta sources, provided those databases can export into the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) format. "If you're making the effort to author, you want it to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible," says UltraNet's Stackhouse. "Doing it on the Web is probably the best way to make this work on a large scale.
Web Self-Help Sources
Advantage kbs:
Phone: (908) 287-2236
Internet:
http://www.akbs.com
Self-Help Software to the Rescue
