Web site support vs. Self service
How much human support does your website need?: April 26, 2004: New
Thinking by Gerry McGovern
Even vending machines require refilling and maintenance. McDonalds could not be run without its staff. The Web is often compared to a library. Well, where would a library be without its librarians?
This is an interesting angle on a web support team. We are having this discussion currently in our organization. I agree with the side of building tools for a community/organization to maintain it’s own content, and; I agree with the notion that like many other self-serve entities a web site requires solid support.
The notion of live assistance might well be sort of ground breaking if we could implement the feature where it is unobtrusive, bug free, and working across most browsers. I had this experience on an ISP site I was browsing to get answers. One ISP had closed shop, another bough the assets. I was on the site of the purchasing ISP to find out how to manage my customer’s domain and suddenly a window opened which contained a live text discussion from a representative of the company! I use MacOSX primarily and it worked just fine which says a lot for such a feature actually (it wasn’t implemented with ActiveX or other MSFT only components in other words).
Think of it.
The domain underwent a transfer to another host, then a name change but I’ll try to dig up the email from that representative… that was another feature of the “live chat” — the rep asked me if I would like the transcript emailed to me.