What the project will achieve

This catalyst will demonstrate how to enable the sharing of vital support information between service providers, CE vendors, retailers and end users so that customer service and support for connected home and end users of the digital lifestyle can be provided on demand through positive, minimal touch, encounters. Both the universal device support server and the services it drives can be cost effectively improved with the ability to provide dynamic content delivery to technical support personnel and end users through intelligent self-help portals/clients, interactive assisted help workflow and advanced business intelligence, all utilizing ontology-driven find/search, deliver, fix and resolve capabilities.

Why it needs to be done

Providing customer service for electronics needs has become a 500-million to 1-billion-dollar expense item for service providers per a recent Parks Associates estimate. Service providers are experiencing significant increases in tier 2 technical support calls that would be considered to be out-of-scope to the provider’s service policies. Service providers normally define their support service responsibility as connectivity to the domicile or enterprise. Increasingly end users are reaching out to service providers to support their digital lifestyles, digital homes, and home networks, to which service providers are often, unfairly, blamed by end users for problems they cannot fix. End users support needs have become so far reaching, the basic connectivity and TV services are no longer the support challenge, but a full on expectation of uninterrupted services that the end user requires. Today’s challenges and new expectations being put in service providers are more directly related to the accessibility and operability issues of the end users environments. End users want everything in their digital homes, home networks, and internal and external digital lifestyles experiences to be seamless in operations, fast in response, and positively experiential in delivery of their content. They are demanding that their service providers be “experience providers” both in service delivery and the technical support required to maintain positive encounters and simplicity of usage.

The potential benefit to the industry

All the participants in this ever growing ecosystem stand to benefit from the seamless interoperability of support systems, content driven encounters, and access to the relevant information to diagnose, repair and support users in their growing digital lifestyles, through intelligent content delivery and low touch technology capabilities.

Tangible benefits include

• Reduced total cost of ownership and increased return on investment to customer premise equipment and service providers
• Reduced operational support costs and times to resolution
• Incremental subscriber revenues from support services and up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
• Increased customer satisfaction resulting in lower subscriber churn
• Positive brand impact and reduction in brand defection due to negative product and service experiences by end users
• Mass market enablement of new digital lifestyle services and appliances
• Reduction in field support and onsite service requirements