* Help with providing technical support
Technical support is expensive, but it spells the difference between the success and failure of a product or service. The problem is that today’s IT products are far too complex for publishers to hope that their printed manuals or the application’s built-in help will answer all user questions.
The problem with most products is compounded by the fact that after release, what is known and understood about the product is guaranteed to evolve as new, unplanned for user environments and ways of using the product appear.
So if you’ve got to have support, what does it cost? According to RightAnswers, a common first-level support call has an average cost of $25, while a second-level call escalates the price to $75 per call.
E-mail support costs around $11, although my experiences with e-mail-based support would imply that this is additive to another support channel, as e-mail support rarely answers your questions but rather delays you before using the telephone or Web.
A chat with remote control is priced around $7, but again this is, I suspect, more often than not another delay before the question gets escalated to the telephone or Web.
The idea of Web support has come up twice in this discussion, so what does that cost? RightAnswers pegs the cost of knowledge bases supplied via the Web at around $1.50 per case, a considerable saving over the $25 level-one call or the $75 level-two call. The company points out that by deflecting just 10 calls per day (that would have been $25 per call for first-level incidents) to a self-service portal would save $60,000 per year! See the RightAnswers cost calculator.
So guess what RightAnswers specialize in? Correct! It offers a Web-based self-service, knowledge base interface called RightAnswers Self Service.
RightAnswers Self Service is a front end to the major trouble ticketing systems from Remedy, Magic, Peregrine, Computer Associates, HP, Intuit and UniPress, and as RightAnswers notes, “It’s all about the content.”
RightAnswers supplies knowledge base content called Knowledge-Paks for more than 200 titles, resulting in more than 100,000 solutions. Knowledge-Paks include Error Messages; Show-IT, which provides both text-based and video training; Diagnostic Trees; How-Tos; Automate-IT, which provides scripts that perform actions or demonstrate features for the user; and Problem/Solution Pairs.
The company also commits that if a solution you need isn’t included in a Knowledge-Pak it will add the required information within one business day at no charge.
Along with providing support information, RightAnswers Self Service also includes extensive usage reporting (see “FAQ Summary Report” and “FAQ Detail Report“), which allows management to assess how the system is being used as well as to identify and track trends.
The RightAnswers system integrates with knowledge management products from ATG, KMXperts, Knova, etc., and also connects to call-management systems from Remedy, Peregrine, CA, UniPress, Intuit and FrontRange) to RightAnswers’ hosted content.
RightAnswers’ Knowledge-Pak Pricing starts at $399 per analyst, per year. RightAnswers is priced by annual subscription and role-based licenses; for example, support analyst access to Knowledge-Paks ranges from $250 to $500 a seat per year, and internal self-service is about $10,000 for 2,500 users. Pricing for external self-service is by negotiation.
