Heck, they should just "announce" that they now offer live chat support. Its not like they'd actually have to provide it or anything! After all, they already claim to offer email support, right?
They could setup some sort of webbot. You think your talking to a live person but your actually typing to a stupid scripted bot. It can say random things like "Have you tried resetting your router?" "Do you have your phone plugged into phone port 1?" for example
Actually, for level one support, that could work. Program a good elizabot to look for keywords, and run through a script. Eventually, if the script runs out, you promise that a level 2 tech (live person) will be connecting to the chat very soon, then drop the connection.
_________________ Comcast Cable (3m down / 256k up) -> Linksys BEFCMU10 v2 (DOCSIS 1.0) -> WRT54G v4 ("Tomato" firmware) -> the rest of my network including a WRTP54G (Firmware: 5.01.04) My Vonage Self-Help Guides: http://vonage.nmhoy.net
It can't be for Vonage. It answered instantly, and is asking me to "please go on" rather than trying to answer my question. A Vonage rep would say "that's not possible. Thank you for calling." followed by a click.
But, it's promising. Elizabots can be trained to mimic humans pretty darned well. That would be funny, and is not too far out the way technology is going.
_________________ Comcast Cable (3m down / 256k up) -> Linksys BEFCMU10 v2 (DOCSIS 1.0) -> WRT54G v4 ("Tomato" firmware) -> the rest of my network including a WRTP54G (Firmware: 5.01.04) My Vonage Self-Help Guides: http://vonage.nmhoy.net
KDWycha Vonage Forum Evangelist
Joined: Jan 19, 2005 Posts: 605
Location: Tampa, Florida USA (813)
I think there is further programming that can be done. The elizabot in that link seems to be dumb as a rock. I have used those things before and they seemed better. Maybe I was drunk when I used it.....
Heck, they should just "announce" that they now offer live chat support. Its not like they'd actually have to provide it or anything! After all, they already claim to offer email support, right?
They could setup some sort of webbot. You think your talking to a live person but your actually typing to a stupid scripted bot. It can say random things like "Have you tried resetting your router?" "Do you have your phone plugged into phone port 1?" for example
Dont laugh! Actually, for the scripts that the level 1 reps follow, that kind of thing can be implemented and will work quite well, even following different branches in the script based on answers given and subsequent questions asked!
I worked for a dotcom that had a software system that did exactly that. Pretty sophisticated too. If you asked it "Who is the President?" it would answer "George W. Bush is the President of the United States." But if you asked the exact identical question right after asking it to "tell me about your company", it would examine the context and answer completely differently with "The President of Vonage is Jeff Citron." It could also handle context things like figuring out what "it" is for the question "How much does it cost? as a followup to a question about product XYZ. It never gets sick, doesn't need health insurance or vacations, and never has an accent you can't understand!
Letting such a thing handle most of level 1 and then handing off to "live chat" seamlessly if necessary to go to level 2 is actually a pretty good system.
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