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 telepho ne calls. Such a mode of support is inefficient, ineffective and generally results in high costs, long service cycles, and poor quality of service. Th e rapid growth of the World Wide Web technology, with its widespread accept ance and accessibility, have resulted in the emergence of Web-based help de sk systems. Depending on the functionality provided by such systems, most o f the associated disadvantages of the traditional help desk environment can be eliminated. This paper describes a Web-based integrated system, the Web HotLine system, that possesses Web-based retrieval, online multilingual tra nslation capability for service records, rule-base reasoning for direct int elligent fault diagnosis by customers or service engineers, different modes of video-conferencing for enhanced customer support and network security f or secure data communications. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights re served.