How do the makers of that astonishing phenomenon Myst manage to get 24 by 7 support -without employing a single extra staffer? From Software Futures, a sister publication…

You just looked at the clock on the VCR and it’s past midnight. Even with time zones on your side you’re still in a jam – it’s Saturday night, you’re at home, and somehow the hour you promised your partner after dinner you’d spend playing Myst became four. But that tight-shut bedroom door is the least of your worries right now. You’re stuck, you don’t know if you’ve screwed up or the program has – but you’re in too deep in the library to want to backtrack to here tomorrow. Do you try and sweat it out or give up?

By Gary Flood

Up until a couple of weeks ago your only option – short of quitting, which as we know no real computer person will ever willingly do – was to pray on the gods of programming and games for the answer… and we all know that with those guys you might as well just mail it in. But now you can get help from the company that sold you the God-darned thing, even at midnight on a Saturday. Even if you haven’t succumbed to Myst, you should still point your browser to http://www.broderbund.com to check out the Web’s first on- line expert system-based help desk for games and other products of the highly successful Novato, California, based outfit. The so-called GizmoTapper has an easy-to-use interface borrowed from another Broderbund product that you or your kids probably know, best-seller Carmen Sandiago. By clicking on icons for either Myst, The Print Shop or any of the other nine titles supported (all but seven still under construction), you can (in the company’s own deathless prose) enter the main problem-solving database of the GizmoTapper – the very same one which is used by Broderbund’s Technical Support department!!! (egregious exclamations in original).

Deceptive appearances

The GizmoTapper is a fun, easy to use, brightly colored kind of a thing – but don’t let that fool you. This marks a significant step forward in the evolution of help desks and the Web. For we can now see a really practical money-saving (if not money-making) commercial application for the Internet that doesn’t conflict with the original hippie-anarchic- freewheelin’ philosophy that’s supposed to be about to be crushed by Capitalism. We’re talking the virtual help desk – the on-line, ready when you want it, goodbye to 45 minutes on hold, broadband help desk solution that will let you tell a wise computer in another part of the world exactly what’s wrong with your product/system/game/application, then let you browse a set of fixes that will stay on screen, or printed off, so you never have to hit the redial to try and get Dion in product support ever again. Gimme, we hear you cry! Well, be patient – but it’s coming. But before we talk about the Web-enabled help desk of the near future, let’s review what we all know (or think we know) about the help desk market right now.It’s growing, for a start; the Aberdeen Group is only one set of analysts predicting a surge of growth in this market – from today’s $250m to around $1bn before the end of the century. But sometimes it seems there’s a cloud of frenetic activity around it that resembles the one the Tasmanian Devil used to generate on his forays through cartoon land. A lot of consolidation, takeovers. And everyone is talking Web/Java/Internet – Remedy is only one of many help desk companies that have made noises about the Web- enabled help desk.If you were at the industry’s showcase Support Services Conference & Expo in Reno, Nevada, in March, you’ll have seen some of the 150-odd help desk/support software vendors jumping up and down about this very topic.

An outsider’s perspective

What are the real trends underlying the sound and fury? Jerry Goldstein is vice president of marketing for Atlanta-based service management specialist Foresight Software Inc, a spin- off of the MXP Business Group of Marcam Corp as of last December. The company is not focused specifically on help desk, but includes such functionality in some of the products and consulting it sells under that umbrella term service management, which can range from supporting help desk personnel to field service technicians to workers in depot repair centers. Its users are typically multinationals in the telecomms, computing, manufacturing and medical technology areas. It currently has 75 such customers, all on Unix, though obviously many are Marcam clients originally. In any case, Goldstein classes himself as having something of an outsider’s perspective on trends in help desk, distinguishing between external and internal markets. While both are growing in his view, he sees some rationalization in the internal area, where a number of companies are beginning to standardize on core technologies such as knowledge bases. Essentially, the problem is quite similar for the prototypical help desk in IS from company to company; nowadays, mainly making sure users understand their Excel or Microsoft Word packages, and supporting home rolled software applications where appropriate. In the external help desk space he notes that there are a ton of companies it’s hard to differentiate between. Here corporations are seeking assistance building systems to help service and maintain their own products, be they trucks, tanks or tricycles, often by outsiders or partners or customers at remote sites. All well and good, you might think. But what’s most interesting about Goldstein’s case is that his own company has been a pioneer in providing its very own Web-enabled virtual help desk to its own customers so it can support its own users. Late last year it released password-protected access to a service which includes a database of known problems, software patches, and spare parts inventory. When we’ve talked about Web help desks so far, it’s been obvious that continuous availability has been one of the first attractive aspects of the notion. But one then begins to wonder if vendors are seeking to cut their own help desk personnel costs as a consequence? This is a question we put to Broderbund as well, but what about in Foresight’s case? The term used by the company about this move is call avoidance. Goldstein does not want this seen as a cheap way of eliminating his own help desk and service professionals. We’ve still got people ready to answer the phone and we always will, he declares. Problems will still require a trained individual to help solve. What we’re doing here is offering some of our more sophisticated customers a more proactive solution, which will more easily fit their needs. The proof of that claim can be found in the impressively quick ramp-up of Web activity. This is no ghost site haunting the Internet! Prior to adding this help desk element, the company’s home page was scoring about 250 hits a week. According to Goldstein, one week after its introduction, the rate had doubled. By week two it had climbed to 1,000 and has now stabilized at 1,500 – an increase in through traffic of some 400%. Those kinds of figures can only be vastly reassuring to the vendor that built the GizmoTapper – Broderbund supplier Inference Corporation. Nobby Akiha is vice president of marketing for the CBR (case based reasoning) specialist, also based in Novato. Software Futures last looked at Inference when the company primarily saw itself as an AI/expert system tools supplier, and at a time when CBR was still viewed internally as a generic technology for many applications.

Going public

But a very different Inference is in the world now: a public one, for a start, as of June last year, and one which has spun- off its knowledge engineering tools to a wholly-owned subsidiary, Brightware, as of May 1995. That IPO was largely fueled by the dramatic surge in growth the company enjoyed following its decision to target its resources at the help desk market. Inference had found that the idea of CBR was most directly relevant as a way for an expert system to help solve a problem by pointing to a collection of similar problems (cases) in its brain. Doesn’t take Einstein to work out that this a technique tailor made for help desk software.We view CBR technology as being useful for other applications outside of the customer help desk arena, most assuredly, says Akiha. We think that eventually it’ll play a role in searching and retrieving the kind of unstructured information that exists in nearly all today’s corporations. But it was under the moniker [of help desk] that we went public, for sure. And it probably is a good part of the reason why the newly-invigorated company reported its last full year and first public at the end of January as good news – which it was, with turnover well up ($29.4m, up 47%) and profits shooting from just $967,000 to $3.8m.Inference says it now has 500 CBR customers, of which at least 80% are using it as a help desk software foundation, and for both internal and external help desk scenarios. It’s also clarified whether or not it too is a help desk supplier by cutting deals with six help desk vendors, whereby its CBR2 problem resolution product will be embedded as an enabling technology (namely, Bendata Inc, McAfee Associates Inc, Scopus Technology Inc, Utopia Partners Inc, Vantive Corp and Workgroup Systems Inc). Akiha offers a further elaboration of Goldstein’s help desk taxonomy; he would like to differentiate call tracking help desk software (in his mind typified by Vantive, Remedy and Scopus), more of a straightforward database-oriented application, with problem resolution knowledge base software like that of his company. Which takes us back to the customers out there who’ll can’t wait to be able to promise themselves they’ll never have to listen to call-waiting muzak from a software company for a while. So if Akiha’s right and the Broderbund example is one of the first really-real examples of that phenomenon, what’s the story?After our own experiences developing a Web strategy we know that Internet-enablement is hardly something you do on a Monday morning before your first coffee of the week gets drunk. Akiha agrees. It was of course an advantage that with the Broderbund case we already had the knowledge base built, so that wasn’t a factor so much as a lot of concern with the way the site looked and felt, from a usability view. Mason Woodbury, vice president, marketing services for $172m revenue Broderbund, spoke to Software Futures about such very matters. We’ve had CBR internally for about two years for the use of our phone reps, and previously we’ve always had to look for technically qualified people to fulfill those roles. But almost by definition such individuals tend not to be that customer friendly. By using the plain English questionnaire style CBR format such technical staff could be freed up for jobs that would be more likely to suit their needs, he says. The next step was to use the Internet to eliminate the middleman from the customer’s point of view. However, while the knowledge base was sound, it turned out that it needed some scrubbing before it could be put on-line. It was a bit trickier than we thought. There were lots of cases of us suing language and terminology that was fine internally but not externally – an answer might come down to something as blunt as ‘Ship ’em a replacement disk!’ which you don’t really want a customer seeing on the screen. Other problems? The GizmoTapper interface required a lot of work, getting the graphics right – about 2.5 people’s jobs for 120 days. But such work has been amply justified by the reaction. It’s been uniformly very positive. People keep commenting that they love it and asking why don’t more companies have such a thing? And was it all designed as a way to pink slip service professionals? Woodbury scoffs, Our goal has never been the ‘replacement’ option – if anything we’ll increase our help desk staffing. At the moment, anyway, it’s far from the case that all our customers have Internet access anyway, even though we will include Web access with most future products. But it’s more a way of providing 24 x 7 support than a way to lay off reps. We just think it’s a far friendlier tool than a phone call. The company thinks it’s got a six to eight month headstart on rivals, but it’s already seen from the traffic that they’ve all been in to have a look at what they need to compete against. Besides, Inference itself plans to ship a product based on this work – after a decent interval, one presumes. But there’s no denying that this is the start of something big. It really is the next logical step and makes a lot of sense to bring a lot of help desk application up there. It turns out that the Web is a very good environment for this sort of application. But think about those critical factors, usability and consistency. It’s not simply a matter of coding in Java or HTML. You’re trying to present your best image of yourself to your customers, says Akiha. Quite. Give your customers a stronger reason to come to your new World Wide Web page than the chance to put the corporate PR slant on cyberspace. Let’s change the slogan from Field Of Dreams’ ‘Build it’ to ‘Help ’em use the products,’ and they will come!