To keep pace with the growing need to provide solutions and support to their customers, many companies have built extensive phone-based customer support departments. The investment can be staggering-large expenses on personnel, training, computers, and other support technologies. Demand for phone-based support fluctuates drastically, leaving these assets unused for hours at a time and still leaving customers dissatisfied. E-support is a self-service, Web-based approach to providing solutions for customers. It helps support organizations scale to handle more customers per support resource, accommodate dynamic shifts in demand, and enable customers to identify and solve many of their routine problems.

Cisco's(r) e-support system, known as TAC Web, has benefits for both Cisco and its customers:

Customers save time because they don't have to wait on hold

Customers are empowered, finding solutions to many of their problems

Cisco Systems saves hundreds of millions of dollars in customer-support costs

TAC Web content solves over 150,000 customer issues per month that would otherwise have gone to phone-based support

Cisco has built a very successful e-support system. In E-Support, the experts who built and run TAC Web tell you exactly how they do it.

Learn what e-support is and how it can help your business. This book consists of non-technical, conversational, and easy-to-read interviews with the experts. Setting up an e-support system isn't cheap or simple, but you can use this book's information as a guide to setting up a successful e-support system, or improving the one you have.

"Cisco TAC Web is an integral part of our e-business strategy by allowing Cisco to reduce the number of phone calls and telephone technicians, while still providing immediate and thorough customer service, which is our number-one priority. This allows both Cisco and the customer to reap the productivity benefits e-business solutions offer."

-John Chambers

President and CEO, Cisco Systems