The industry threatens to collapse under the weight of industry bodies and lobbies, yet still they keep being born. Latest, announced from up in Redmond, Washington State, brings together 19 computer industry and high technology companies claiming aggregate annual revenues exceeding $110,000m in the Customer Support Consortium. The group represents a wide cross section of the industry from Hewlett-Packard Co to Intel Corp, NCR Corp to US West Inc, and its mission is to develop an enterprise-wide product knowledge management system to help resolve product-related problems suffered by customers. The aim is a dramatic improvement in customer satisfaction levels and a significant lowering of the cost per customer contact. The effort will be conducted by the support organisations of the member companies and will be managed by Symbologic Corp, based in Redmond, which claims expertise in customer-support technology. The product knowledge management system now under development includes software tools and applications to automate acquisition, management and use of large and complex bodies of product knowledge. The system will use intelligent retrieval technologies to increase the speed, ease and accuracy of answering customer support calls. It will be conceived as an enterprise-wide system because customer support organisations need to share product knowledge with sales and engineering organisations, and will be designed to enable members to distribute product knowledge to corporate help desks, system integrators, value-added resellers and strategic business partners; it will be an open, portable client-server system. Results will be released to the members throughout next year. Founder members not already mentioned are 3M Co, Active Voice Corp, Advanced Technology Laboratories Inc, Banyan Systems Inc, BBN Software Products Inc, ComputerLand Corp, Compuware Inc, Digital Communications Associates Inc, Dun & Bradstreet Software Inc, Maxtor Corp, Santa Cruz Operation Inc, Silicon Graphics Inc, Sybase Inc and something called WSIPC.
