The quality and availability of customer support can make the difference between satisfied customers who will buy your products or services again and unsatisfied customers who will return products and take their business to a competitor. But providing appropriate support to customers can be a very expensive activity.
Goal: To reduce support costs and improve customer service by giving customers quick and easy access to technical support information.
Components: Microsoft Windows NT Server version 4.0; Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) version 4.0; any NNTP client software for anonymous access or Microsoft Internet Mail and News version 4.0 client software for advanced security.
Environment: The Internet.
Setup Considerations: Enable anonymous access; use the Domain Name System (DNS) or Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS) for name resolution; provide access through the firewall if one is present.
Other: Consider using moderated newsgroups to prevent customers from posting unwanted or technically incorrect articles, but be aware that this can limit customers' ability to help each other if your support staff is not immediately available.
If you are already using IIS to provide public Web pages to customers, you can add customer support newsgroups to the same computer initially. If newsgroup activity increases, you can then move Microsoft NNTP Service to its own computer.
You can create a single newsgroup for each product you are supporting, or you can create several newsgroups for each product, one for each support topic. For example, if your product is a mousetrap, you can create the newsgroup support.mousetrap. If you expect a high volume of articles, you can create support.mousetrap.installation, support.mousetrap.operation, support.mousetrap.maintenance, and so on.
The URLs for your newsgroups have the following formats:
news://server/newsgroup
news://server/newsgroup/article
To ensure customer acceptance of newsgroups, your customer support personnel should read the newsgroup articles frequently and respond to questions promptly. It is also a good idea to post those frequently asked questions (FAQs) that address the most common support questions on a regular basis.
Your customers are happier because they have immediate access to the latest questions and answers about their product. They can post their own questions and then check back later for a response from your support personnel or from another customer.
Your support personnel are more productive because they do not have to answer the same questions over and over. Your product teams can improve quality by monitoring the newsgroups to get customer feedback. By analyzing the access logs, you can track how support activity changes over time.