E-Support: How Cisco Systems Saves Millions While Improving Customer Support

Product Description

To keep pace with the growing need to provide solutions and support to their customers, many companies have built extensive phone-based customer support departments. The investment can be staggering-large expenses on personnel, training, computers, and other support technologies. Demand for phone-based support fluctuates drastically, leaving these assets unused for hours at a time and still leaving customers dissatisfied. E-support is a self-service, Web-based approach to providing solutions for customers. It helps support organizations scale to handle more customers per support resource, accommodate dynamic shifts in demand, and enable customers to identify and solve many of their routine problems.

Cisco's(r) e-support system, known as TAC Web, has benefits for both Cisco and its customers:

• Customers save time because they don't have to wait on hold
• Customers are empowered, finding solutions to many of their problems
• Cisco Systems saves hundreds of millions of dollars in customer-support costs
• TAC Web content solves over 150,000 customer issues per month that would otherwise have gone to phone-based support

Cisco has built a very successful e-support system. In E-Support, the experts who built and run TAC Web tell you exactly how they do it.

Learn what e-support is and how it can help your business. This book consists of non-technical, conversational, and easy-to-read interviews with the experts. Setting up an e-support system isn't cheap or simple, but you can use this book's information as a guide to setting up a successful e-support system, or improving the one you have.

"Cisco TAC Web is an integral part of our e-business strategy by allowing Cisco to reduce the number of phone calls and telephone technicians, while still providing immediate and thorough customer service, which is our number-one priority. This allows both Cisco and the customer to reap the productivity benefits e-business solutions offer."
-John Chambers
President and CEO, Cisco Systems

In E-Support, you learn how Cisco Systems developed its online customer support system and how you can apply it to your organization with:

• Overview & Planning-Understand and develop an e-support strategy
• Architecture-See how it should all be put together
• Metrics-Measure exactly where you're succeeding and failing
• Strategy-Determine customer needs and methods to meet those needs
• Design-Design the Web site user interface so customers can use it
• Marketing-Get customers to visit, and keep them coming back
• Competitive Analysis-Assess your competitors' e-support sites

This book is part of the Cisco Press Internet Business Solutions Series. Books in this series provide valuable information to help business professionals understand and evaluate how to use the Internet for business productivity and planning.

Praise For E-Support: How Cisco Systems Saves Millions While Improving Customer Support

"Cisco Press, a provider of technical details and practical information about all things networking, is releasing books with a business spin. E-Support: How Cisco Systems Saves Millions While Improving Customer Support, released in August 2002, offers advice and information on how companies can look to Cisco's online support strategy to reduce costs in their own operations. Another title of interest for executives looking to add to their technology bookshelves - or those of their technology managers - is Cisco Internet Architecture Essentials. The authors uses Cisco's experience in developing Internet business solutions for itself and other companies, and provide information on how to ensure consistent and scalable network specifications for Internet business implementations."
- IQ Magazine, November/December 2002

"It (E-Support: How Cisco Systems Saves Millions While Improving Customer Support) does contain a treasure trove of ideas (e.g., incorporating dedicated technical writers into support teams), and it places a bandage on the bleeding edge of e-support by modeling a successful e-support content team...the book does a good job of describing the basic vision, scope, and perspective you need to be successful in e-support."
- The Rational Edge, November 2002
Read More

"If your customer support is a drain on your balance sheet you may want to read E-Support: How Cisco Systems Saves Millions While Improving Customer Support, by Andrew Connan and Vince Russell. The paperback, published by Cisco Press, provides an in-depth study of Cisco's Web-based, self-service approach to customer support, and offers advice on how to develop and implement it in your organization."
– CRM Magazine, October 2002

Index

Download - 102 KB -- Index

Foreword

Download - 52.9 KB -- Book Foreword (pdf)

Table of Contents

Introduction.


 1. Visual Tour of Cisco's TAC Web Site.


 2. Assessing, Planning, Building, and Managing the TAC Web.


 3. TAC Workflow and the TAC Case Open Tool.


 4. TAC Web Mission, Vision, and Lessons Learned.


 5. Site Architecture.


 6. TAC Web Marketing.


 7. Metrics.


 8. Competitive Analysis.


 9. Content Matched to Customer Needs.


10. User Interface Design.


11. User Communities.


12. TAC Web SMEs.


13. TAC Web Tools.


14. TAC Web Technical Writers.

Downloadable Sample Chapter

Download - 194 KB -- Chapter 5: Site Architecture