At least that's the philosophy behind the recent opening of an Australian office for eSupport services provider Support.com. Billed by the company as the first of its kind in this country, Support.com has been designed a personalised support system which is supposed to help reduce the time and cost of doing support that normally be done by a help desk.
The system operates mainly on three levels: a self-healing capability, guided user instruction, and assisted service. The self-healing aspect attempts to identify and repair PC problems before they come up while the Self-Service component directs users to the information they require to fix their own issues.
If both the self-healing and self-service fail to resolve the problem then the issue is referred on to a help desk specialist. According to Support.com, the system also incorporates a personalised support capability that tracks configuration details and support issues for each user and retains if for later analysis.
While it is new to Australia, the company has a well established history overseas and boasts such clients as GE, Cisco, IBM and Sony. The establishment into Australia is part of the company's plans to expand its reach worldwide.
"The move into the Australian market is part of a global expansion initiative of Support.com," said Jon Baxter, regional director for Support.com. "Many of our customers... are deploying our solution globally and we need to be able to support their initiatives."
Although this solution could help to make Support.com a major ASP, this is not a segment of the market to which the company aspires. "It is a solution than an ASP would use to protect the ASP applications [it is] deploying to [its] customers," explained Baxter. "The ASP may host the portal themselves or outsource that to an organisation such as Fujitsu."
As one of Australia's largest outsourcers, Fujitsu is using the Support.com system to better help and support its customers. "We currently use traditional channels such as a call support centre," explained Terry Carter, manager of Fujitsu Services for Fujitsu Australia. "We reassessed our service and realised that we wanted to have contact with our customers via the Web."
Fujitsu Australia first had contact with the Support.com system over six months ago and has been trialing it for two months in its Sydney call centre, which it manages out of Canberra. Primarily, Fujitsu was interested in the proactive approach of Support.com, particularly as it could help to reduce the more routine support calls.
"We chose [Support.com] because it allows our people to focus on value-added tasks for our customers," said Carter. Instead of having to take the standard calls about PC problems, these are generally fixed by the system itself or the user's system can be rolled back to a time when the PC was operational.
While the system helps to reduce the bulk of simpler support issues it also helps Fujitsu because it provides an itemised trouble ticket that negates the necessity of asking for the user's details. "All the usual support questions that get asked like what operating system are you running, what is your IP address, what browser are you using... don't need to be asked because that comes as part of the job-ticket," said Carter
Another major boon for Fujitsu was that the system was customisable to help support whatever range of mission-critical applications was required. "You're not limited to what comes out of the box," explained Carter. "It means we can configure it for different packages of support, not what Support.com put into the system."
One of the major factors to emerge while installing the Support.com system, as far as Carter was concerned, related to the problems of culture that Fujitsu had to face with its customers. "We've learned that there is a cultural issue with implementing this... by getting users to manage their own support," noted Carter. "We have to train our staff to get users to use the support portal, which comes as part of the system, to help themselves."
