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<HTML><HEAD><TITLE>Chapter 34 -- How Technical Support Works on an Intranet</TITLE><META></HEAD><BODY TEXT="#000000" BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" LINK="#0000EE" VLINK="#551A8B" ALINK="#CE2910"><H1><FONT SIZE=6 COLOR=#FF0000>Chapter 34</FONT></H1><H1><FONT SIZE=6 COLOR=#FF0000>How Technical Support Works onan Intranet</FONT></H1><HR><P><CENTER><B><FONT SIZE=5><A NAME="CONTENTS">CONTENTS</A></FONT></B></CENTER><UL><LI><A HREF="#UsinganIntranettoProvideTechnicalSupport">Using an Intranet to Provide Technical Support</A></UL><HR><P>Almost any company that sells goods and services to consumers-andto a certain extent, that sells to businesses-spends a substantialamount of time, money, and corporate resources providing technicalsupport. It need not be a computer or software company. Even peoplewho buy washing machines or CD players or lamps run into problemswith the products and need help.<P>Providing excellent technical support, especially for companiesthat need to reach a large number of people, can be an exceedinglyexpensive proposition. Typically, technical support is providedvia the telephone, sometimes using toll-free 800 phone numbers.The cost of hiring and staffing support lines, as well as payingfor telecommunications costs, can be staggeringly high.<P>An intranet can help cut those costs. Instead of having to staffmany expensive support lines, a company can instead create a publicWeb site that people can visit. This Web site can contain an enormousamount of technical support information-everything from answersto common problems, to downloadable software to fix problems withhardware, to links to access user-to-user forums where peoplecan exchange answers they've found to common problems.<P>In the next illustration, we'll return to our imaginary company,CyberMusic, and see how they use their intranet to help providetechnical support to their customers.<P>When companies provide technical support using Internet and intranettechnology, much of what they do is posted outside the corporatefirewall, on the Internet. A variety of material can be posted.For example, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) can be posted-answersto the most common technical problems. A database of problemsand their answers can be searched directly from the Web, usingthe Common Gateway Interface. Public discussion areas can be setup, where people post their problems, and technical support personnelcan answer. And other customers can answer the questions as well.If the product is related to hardware or software, patches tothe software can be posted that can be downloaded to solve technicalproblems. Another bonus in using Web sites to provide technicalsupport is that the company can get people to fill in their names,addresses, and other information-a way of gathering customer names.<P>While much of what is posted is outside the corporate firewallon the Internet, what goes on inside the firewall on the intranetis still used in a variety of ways to help provide technical support.The databases that are posted on the Internet, for example, arefirst created on the intranet, and then exported to the Internet.E-mail sent to the technical support department must pass throughthe corporate firewall from the Internet. And when someone registersto receive technical support, the information from the personis sent in a secure fashion back through the firewall into theIntranet. There, it will be put into a corporate customer database,so that the company can, for example, send out direct mail toall its customers.<H2><A NAME="UsinganIntranettoProvideTechnicalSupport"><FONT SIZE=5 COLOR=#FF0000>Using an Intranet to Provide Technical Support</FONT></A></H2><P>For companies that sell goods and services to the consumer market,providing technical support can be an expensive, time-consumingchore. Using a combination of a company's intranet and the Internet,technical support costs can be cut dramatically, and better technicalsupport can be delivered. This illustration shows how our imaginarycompany CyberMusic uses them to provide technical support. CyberMusicmanufactures CD players as well as publishes and sells records,so this page shows how they provide technical support for bothlines of products.<UL><LI>CyberMusic creates a public Web site for technical supportthat anyone can access over the Internet. They publicize the sitein their product literature, in their advertising, and even whenpeople call into their technical support lines, a recorded messagesuggests that people access the Web site to get immediate technicalsupport. The Web site is located on a bastion host outside theCyberMusic intranet, and is separated from it by a filtering router. The bastion host and the filtering routers are part of the firewallthat protects CyberMusic's intranet from the Internet.<LI>CyberMusic has found through the years that only 10 or 12common problems cause 80 percent of the calls to their technicalsupport phone lines-and these are problems that can be solvedquite simply. (For example, a surprising number of people simplyforget to plug in the power cord of their CD player.) So CyberMusicposts the problems and answers to them in FAQs on their Web site.This cuts down tremendously on calls to their technical supportline.<LI>Not all problems can be solved by reading the FAQs. So CyberMusicuses several other techniques for providing technical support.The company creates a database of common problems and solutionsthat can be searched via the Web using the Common Gateway Interface. A CGI program takes the user's question, formulates it as a queryfor the database, submits it, and returns the result of the queryin an HTML formatted page.<LI>Sometimes the best technical support is provided by people,not FAQs and databases. So CyberMusic has created a number ofdiscussion areas where people can ask questions about their problems,and where CyberMusic technical support professionals can answerthe questions. In yet other technical support areas, customerscan answer each other's questions. These areas are set up as USENETnewsgroups, accessible via browsers such as Netscape Navigatorand Microsoft's Explorer.<LI>The company also provides a "mailto" link on thetechnical support page that when clicked on launches an e-mailprogram in the customer's browser, with the e-mail address ofthe technical support staff already filled in. The person cannow type in a question, and the e-mail will be sent through theInternet, through the CyberMusic firewall, and then to the technicalsupport department. Once there, a technical support manager usesgroupware to route the request to the proper person, and usesthe tracking features of groupware to see that the question isanswered.<LI>CyberMusic CD's contain more than just musical informationon them-they can also be read by a computer and contain interviewsand interactive articles about the musicians and other information.CyberMusic has found, however, that some computers have troublereading the CD's. To solve the problem, they make available specialdrivers and patches for those computers. The drivers and patchescan be downloaded directly from the Web site on the bastion host.This saves CyberMusic a great deal of money in processing, handling,and mailing costs.<LI>CyberMusic, like many companies that sell products to consumers,tries to maintain as comprehensive a list as possible of peoplewho have purchased their products. Most people, however, don'tsend in reply forms, and so the number of customer names and addressesthey have is quite small. CyberMusic uses its Web site to getmany more names. One way to get names is to have people type intheir name, address, and other information before they can getto a certain area of the Web site-for example, to the discussionsor to download patches. Another way is to sponsor contests onthe site, such as giving away CD players and records. When a nameand address are typed into a Web form, the data is sent throughCyberMusic's firewall to its intranet. It's then put in a customerdatabase, where CyberMusic can use it for customer mailings.</UL><HR><CENTER><P><A HREF="ch33.htm"><IMG SRC="PC.GIF" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=88 WIDTH=140></A><A HREF="#CONTENTS"><IMG SRC="CC.GIF" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=88 WIDTH=140></A><A HREF="contents.htm"><IMG SRC="HB.GIF" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=88 WIDTH=140></A><A HREF="ch35.htm"><IMG SRC="NC.GIF" BORDER=0 HEIGHT=88 WIDTH=140></A><HR WIDTH="100%"></P></CENTER></BODY></HTML>?? 快捷鍵說明
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