Technology-Based Customer Service

Traditional approaches to improving customer service generally focus primarily on the interpersonal aspects of customer service, such as being polite, reducing call wait time, and following problems through to completion (and customer satisfaction). These types of factors are indeed critical to successful customer service and cannot be overlooked in any effort to improve service. However, they tend to neglect another equally important component of providing excellent service to customers(the technology that the service desk or help desk is relying on to provide that service.

An illustration of this is the use of software such as PC Anywhere. Before the advent of such software, attempting to assist customers by telephone or on-line involved a series of questions, hit-or-miss attempted solutions, and the usually laborious process of walking a non-technical customer through a complex technical solution. When PC Anywhere was introduced, the service desk technician was suddenly

. . .
ed to monitor, fix, maintain, and respond to customer systems. To provide the ôalways onö component of its excellent customer service, Consonus uses clustering. Clustering essentially coordinates multiple computers to do the same task. The clusters connect multiple machines together in such a way that they function as though they were a single scalable system, so there is no single point of failure. Clusters can be organized into an ordered cluster designed to increase availability by providing redundancy at all levels of both hardware and software. This makes system resources virtually 100% available. In Clustering Is Not ChildÆs Play (Lawton, 2004, p. 56), George Lawton says, ôIt does not matter what happens to that array(you can take a hit on memory, or get an NT blue screen and that array will continue to execute as if nothing ever happened. It is what we call compute through technology.ö Machines can be taken in and out of usage without the end user ever noticing an outage. Whereas in the old days, finding an eight-hour period to run an upgrade in required nothing short of magic, with system redundancy, upgrades can take place transparently without the user incurring any down time at all. And an additional benefit of clust
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Service Desk, Service Traditional, George Lawton, HP Openviewwas, Journal Consonus, Automation Manager, HP OpenView, Retrieved December, Service Abstract, Firehunter Agilent, customer service, service desk, retrieved december, december 4, 4 2004, retrieved december 4, december 4 2004, hp openview, openview service desk, data centers, openview service, hardware software, service desk module, development team, support development team,
Approximate Word count = 2451
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

More Essays on Technology-Based Customer Service