The dull but important and necessary category of help desks received its due at this year's Demo08 conference with a handful of companies offering some new twists to the old problem of customer service.
To my mind, the most innovative help desk solution came from SupportSpace that leverages an online community of experts with skills in multiple high tech technologies to solve an end user's PC problems.
This help desk marketplace service has a nice interface that gives a user in need of help pictures of the tech experts, lists the skills they claim to have, their fee structure plus an unedited review and ratings section from others who have used the experts' services.
It also gives the tech expert the ability to post a short
self-promotion blurb, such as "no problem is too big or too small."
Users can also search by skill category such as printer troubleshooting or Internet login difficulties, and when they find someone they like they can start a conversation with an IM chat or phone call.
Support.com's PC Health Check uses its diagnostic tool set to let users know when it is time to call for help.
Users download the Health Check application and install it locally.
The software then checks the system configuration, looks for possible updates, and then scans the PC, looking at hardware, software installed and the overall performance of the PC.
Health Check generates a non-jargon, plain English report that rates and places performance, security and hardware into such categories as non-optimal or optimal.
If a system is rated non-optimal users have a choice of scrolling down to review any of 55 different ways to self-tune the system.
For example, the scan may have discovered that there are 1100 files in cache and eliminating those files would free up 80MB of space.
If users prefer not to do it themselves a phone call allows a Support.com technician to take over and optimize the system.
Pathworks Software Helpstream service is not unlike SupportSpace in that it takes in part a community and collaborative approach to customer service.
The application is targeted at any company that offers a product and that fields a customer service center.
Users can ask the community of users a question, open up a knowledge base, or submit a problem as a help desk query and be assigned a trouble ticket.
In the future, the service will also create a wiki platform for collaboration as a way to update community responses to problems.
Aternity, part of the Intel Capital investment portfolio, uses business intelligence, called the Performance Intelligence Platform, to do performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
The platform creates baseline performance profiles and then matches user desktops to the baseline.
If a system is below baseline an alert is sent. The system then isolates affected users and sends a troubleticket.
IT receives an email notification that a problem is occurring and an update to the user is also sent when the problem has been identified.
The Platform uses all of the common attributes of the impacted group in order to identify when the problem started, what applications are affected and which users are affected.
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