An integrated help desk support for customer services over the World Wide Web - a case study

In a traditional help desk environment, service engineers typically provide a worldwide customer base support through the use of long-distance telephone calls. Such a mode of support is inefficient, ineffective and generally results in high costs, long service cycles, and poor quality of service. The rapid growth of the World Wide Web technology, with its widespread acceptance and accessibility, have resulted in the emergence of Web-based help desk systems. Depending on the functionality provided by such systems, most of the associated disadvantages of the traditional help desk environment can be eliminated. This paper describes a Web-based integrated system, the WebHotLine system, that possesses Web-based retrieval, online multilingual translation capability for service records, rule-base reasoning for direct intelligent fault diagnosis by customers or service engineers, different modes of video-conferencing for enhanced customer support and network security for secure data communications. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.