This has been an exciting week for IBM Lotus Technical Support. First, the new Enterprise Support Portal has gone live for Lotus, giving our customers a customizable Support experience, focused on the products they care about. (Try it out: www.ibm.com/software/support Select Lotus, and then pick your favorite product. )
Second, and more personally exciting to me, is that IBM Support Technical Chat went Live on Tuesday! Lotus Connections, Quickr-Domino, and Sametime customers in North America and Europe now have the capability to use texting as a way to exchange information with IBM Support, in addition to phone and email. We plan to roll this out for most Lotus products in most geographies over the next couple of months. The Lotus Customer Support Engineers are extremely excited about this, as it's often difficult to reach customers by phone, introducing delays in solving problems. And we all know about inbox overload, so email isn't a great alternative. Technical Chat is another method, besides the phone, to collaborate in real time.
Technical Chat is built on the new AJAX proxy capabilities of Sametime 8.5, straight out of the box, using the Sametime SDK. The Sametime web client is zero footprint, with no pre-download required. Customers securely login to the IBM Technical support community using their IBM.com identity; IBM Support Technicians can then communicate with them via text as open issues are worked to completion. Privacy is fully protected, as IBM used the Sametime SDK to customize the web client so it does not show anyone else logged into the community.
For those who are hopeful that this will give them an edge with IBM Technical Support, I regret to inform you that Chat isn't a method to jump the queue. A request for a chat is placed in the same queue as telephone requests for call back. Requests are handled in the order they are received.
You can read more about Technical Support Chat here:
Customer Article for Lotus Technical Support Chat: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/lotus/support/chat/
Beth Benoit | 8 January 2010 02:54:55 PM ET | | Comments (0)
