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.

The target audience for this book is CEOs and Senior VPs seeking to either implement an e-Support solution or improve an existing one. Of particular interest to these execs is the chapter on metrics, which provides graphics and sample charts showing the kinds of metrics Cisco relies on. (Walker Information regularly surveys Cisco customers regarding the TAC Web site content). It examines the greatest challenges involved in acting on these metrics, as well as what metrics are meaningful and where they come from. For example, Cisco measures what technical articles customers access most frequently so that their tech support team can proactively get that information to customers in a more direct form - either via e-mail messages or by making the content more visible on the TAC Web. Cisco also measures customer satisfaction with the technical content on the Web site, so that they can improve its effectiveness and accessibility..