When customers connect to your applications through the Internet
you may not know who they are, what they're using or what their
history is. But it's still possible to help them, says Danny
Bradbury
If there's one thing that IT professionals like, it's certainty.
While the Internet offers an unprecedented opportunity for
information exchange, universal access to computing services and
strong business growth, it is probably one of the least IT-friendly
media, at least from a support perspective.
IT support staff like to know who their end-users are and what
systems they're using. End-users communicating with a system across
the Internet, however, could be running anything from a
state-of-the-art PC, through to a simple Linux box, or even a Wap
phone. This leaves support departments with a daunting challenge,
trying to ensure that end-users get the service that they want,
while having little or no information about them. The goalposts
aren't so much shifting as being lost in an impenetrable fog.
Another variable in the equation is the relationship between the
company and the customers it is supporting. In-house support
systems simply have to run well, or your company would not function
because your staff would not be able to use your infrastructure.
With customer support, however, you have to take into account the
potential revenue stream from your customer base when investing in
support, points out Nigel Langley, enterprise consultant at IT
services consultancy Technosys. "It's something that comes off your
bottom-line. It's a cost," he says. "If you can't afford that cost
you must charge for it, and if you can't charge for it, you have a
problem."
You must take this into account when choosing the technology
that will support your Web-focused support operation. At least one
thing is certain in this scenario, because it's true of every other
support environment - if you can stop support calls before they
arise you'll save yourself a lot of money.
Bob Wild, a consultant at Compass Management Consulting, is
fanatical about the subject. So many companies don't do their
homework during the design phase that they end up with badly
designed applications that present all sorts of problems to the
end-users across the Web and get the support lines ringing, he
explains. He emphasises the fact that a computer application with a
Web front end is still an application, and as such is subject to
the same design rules as all other software.
There are ways to ensure that your software is watertight,
however. The Rational Unified Process from Rational Software is
quickly becoming the de facto standard for software development
using component technologies, which are the lifeblood of
middle-tier Web applications. The process encompasses issues such
as the definition of business entities, the gathering of
requirements for the application and, perhaps most importantly, the
software testing process. For many companies, software testing is
the booby prize given to the unwitting 16-year-old on work
experience at the end of the project, and yet it is an important
issue for any development team. Proper testing will enable you to
check things like exception handling, to make sure that your
end-users are not directed to pages within your site that don't
exist, for example.
Another important issue in a Web support context is load
testing. So many Web sites have suffered from bad capacity
planning, meaning that when Web traffic peaks, the site falls over
or starts blocking users. Companies such as Rational Software and
Israeli firm Mercury Interactive produce software that enables you
to simulate different levels of traffic on your Web site to measure
its performance. You will be glad you did this when your
competition's Web site falls over and its support helpdesk is
flooded with calls from irate users.
Design is even an important issue at the presentation layer,
which is something that e-commerce application designers often
dismiss as irrelevant. On a technical level, technologies such as
dynamic HTML (DHTML) can cause problems for browsers, because
suppliers do not implement them in the same way. Consequently, a
piece of DHTML code in Windows Explorer might not operate in the
same way that it does in Netscape Navigator, for example, and the
same is true of Javascript, which is becoming an increasingly
popular means of handling applications such as form validation
online. If you have ever encountered a Javascript error on a Web
site that will be the likely cause of the problem (that, or simply
erroneous code that doesn't work in any browser). This can be
irritating when you are using Javascript for animated graphics and
such like, but it can be potentially fatal for your support
department if you're using it for a business critical piece of
logic such as form validation. Langley's answer is to test his
solutions on as many different browsers as possible.
Even the most expert application designer will probably not be
able to prevent all support calls, so you must have support
mechanisms in place to handle the rest of them. It is still
possible to spot problems early on before they begin costing you
customers.
Many customers will use your Web application for specific
business processes such as buying products, finding marketing
material or updating personal profiles, for example. So you might
want to use Business Bridge, a new product from Systar that monitors your Internet application,
simulating customer access to various processes and returning a
quickly assessable summary of whether they are performing
adequately, along with a description of the possible technical
cause of a problem.
Online chat
After all that, you'll still find support queries turning up
that must be dealt with. Dealing with queries across the Internet
rather than over the telephone is one way of reducing your support
cost, but this does not mean that you have to present an inhuman
interface to customers. Technologies are emerging that enable
support technicians to deal with customers live online, using a
mixture of online chat, videoconferencing and in some cases remote
control of customers' PCs.
Talisma is one company offering live support in this way. Using
its technology you can monitor what individual users are doing on
your site, and fire off interactive chat sessions with them if you
feel that they may be running into trouble.
The company also offers a facility to outsource your technical
support via e-mail. It will work with your staff to build up a
knowledge base of different problems and answers, and can then
create predefined templates that it will send in response to
specific queries. This will leave your support staff free to deal
with the most complex, ad hoc queries from Internet users.
Other companies are also providing live chat services for
support technicians. Helpmagic provides a range of different
services, including Chatmagic for online text chat and Mailmagic
for e-mail-based communications. Companies wanting to use the
service can download buttons to put on their Web sites, which can
then be linked either to the Helpmagic customer support centre, or
to support staff within the customer company itself, depending on
whether it wants to outsource its support or not.
Handling support queries online also offers you the facility to
personalise your support. Primus, for example, offers its e-Support
software, which marries Web-based support facilities with
personalisation technology. It enables you to get a better
understanding of the support issue before customers are routed
through to a live support technician online.
Really smart companies will reference a database containing
their customers' details, so that incoming support calls can be
prioritised according to customer importance. There's no point
spending half an hour solving one support problem for an occasional
customer who doesn't spend very much, when another customer who
spends much more with your company is waiting online.
Jay Goode, director of development at e-commerce consultancy
Tanning Technology, is particularly interested in the idea of
monitoring end-users' movements around a site, but wants to take it
one step further by enabling technical support staff to find out
exactly what they are doing, including assessing what they are
entering on online forms, for example.
"From a customer support agent's point of view that would make
the job a lot easier," he says. "Every time you do something the
system can display it on a customer service person's screen, so
that when you're talking to me I can walk you through the site.
Before you get the user to look at specific things, the customer
service operative can know what values were entered."
Unfortunately, he is not aware of any third-party software
products that allow companies to drill down to this level, and his
answer to the problem was to custom code his own solution. He
produced a servlet (a piece of code residing on the Web server)
that works with the Web application to find out what pages have
been submitted to the user. For companies using server-side
technologies, such as Microsoft's Active Server Pages and Sun's
Java Server Pages, this shouldn't be too difficult, because the ASP
and JSP templates deliver pages to the end-user by using scripts to
process inputs.
On speaking terms
If all else fails, you may need to resort to the dreaded
telephone to resolve a customer problem. Using conventional
interactive voice response [IVR] will enable you to route calls
from customers running different machines and experiencing
different categories of problem, for example. Alternatively, you
can make it easier for customers (who generally hate automated
telephone systems) by enabling them to enter the nature of the
problem, and then clicking on a callback button, alerting one of
your customer representatives to telephone them at a set time. This
is another service that Helpmagic can provide.
Nevertheless, this approach may not be appropriate if you want
to speak to customers while they are online to your Web site.
Depending on the nature of your customer base you may find that
many of them are connecting to the Internet over the same phone
line that they use to call your support line, meaning that they
won't be able to access the Web site when speaking to your customer
representative. This will be particularly true in consumer-focused
sites, when many people will access the service from home.
An innovative solution is to use Voice over IP (VoIP), or even
videoconferencing, as a means of connecting with your customer
while online. Such services will be more effective as broadband
Internet access becomes more widely used in the UK. Helpmagic
provides Voicemagic, a button to start up a VoIP session between
customers and support staff.
Ultimately, while companies running Internet operations are
faced with an unspecified and difficult to control user base they
do have the advantage of an access medium where queries can be
filtered and controlled in a more effective manner than
conventional phone-based support infrastructures. Every challenge
has a flipside opportunity, and savvy companies will use a mixture
of automation and collaboration technologies on their Web sites to
ensure that customers get the best possible level of service.
Seamless transition