chapter 12 after-sales support. - 2 - (c) 2000 dr. ralph bergmann and prof. dr. michael m. richter,...

Chapter 12After-Sales Support

- 2 - (c) 2000 Dr. Ralph Bergmann and Prof. Dr. Michael M. Richter, Universität Kaiserslautern

Recommended References

• R. Bergmann, S. Breen, M. Göker, M. Manago, S. Wess: Developing Industrial Case-Based Reasoning Application - The INRECA- Methodology. Springer Lecture Notes in AI 1612,

1999. • M. Lenz, B. Bartsch-Spörl, H.-D. Burkhard, S. Wess (eds.):

Case-Based Reasoning Technology. Springer Lecture Notes in AI 1400, 1998.


The Task

• Situation: The product is delivered to the customer. The customer has a problem with the product because e.g. a failure occurs or he does not understand how operate it properly.

• The customer wants help and advice and the supplier wants to keep the customer.

• A first possibility is to provide a hotline (help desk). Then a system should support the help desk operator.

• In electronic commerce it is intended to provide the advice automatically, e.g. via the internet.


General Aspects of CRM (1)• CRM is concerned with:• Reachability:

– There should be help available.– Customer should know how to contact supplier: Phone,mail,

fax, internet.– Suppliers reaction should be fast (if promised to call back

within 20 minutes this should not take a day).

• Cost should be adequate or free: An important strategic decision for the company.

• Agents (persons or software agents) contacted should have sufficient knowledge.


General Aspects of CRM (2)

Customer problem

Supplier company

Problem withdelivery etc

Advice on handling

Fault diagnosis

Additional

parts, products

Initial contactKind of problem

Finding correct agent or expert


Call Centers

• After sales support is often provided by call centers.• Because of the wide variety of the capacities the

support provided by call centers is very different with respect to the comfort provided to the customer.

• The support can be provided in different ways.• One extreme is that the whole advice process is

performed by a human (and the knowledge is in the head of the human) and in another extreme it runs fully automatically.

• To come close to the latter is a major target in E-C.


Fault Diagnosis

• A great part of after sales support is concerned with fault diagnosis: The product bought by the customer does not operate as wanted. This may be due to two reasons:– inadequate handling– a real fault

• A call by the customer starts a dialogue which has to identify the real reason and has to give an advice (proper handling, repair).

• Fault diagnosis can either use straight forward algorithms (if available) or case based reaoning as described in chapter 3.


The Role of Dialogues

• The query (complaint, search for help etc.) from the customer is usually not that clear that a fully satisfactory answer can be given.

• The completion of the information uses the principles for the dialogues as developed in chapter 11.

• Often the situation is much simpler because there is only a restricted number of queries. Then the dialogue can be standardized or even omitted (static or dynamic forms).

• Sometimes at least many queries can be handled this way: So-called frequently asked questions (FAQ‘s).


FAQ’s

• An FAQ is considered as a case consisting of a pair

(question, solution document).• The solution document may be

– an error document– a handling advice– a decription of additional new parts.

• Similarities are computed between actual query and the question part of the FAQ.

• The uses of FAQ’s represent degenerated dialogues.• The choice of the FAQ’s is crucial for the success:

Updating the case base is important!


FAQ-documentHardware:PC & HP DeskJet 870

Software: Windows 95

Query: My new printer has problems with pictures from the graphic program

Answer: Load and install the program that activates the program

error documentOperating System:Sun OS 4.1

Modul:Address administration

Error:Failure when the input has long street names

Solution:Not enough memory for the

address object, repaired in addrObj.c

Frequently Asked Questions: Example


Analysis (1)

Query: On my PC verursacht the inputof long street names leads to a crash with the message

“storage error”.• A1: Under Windows 3.1 there is not enough

memory for the name of the streetallocated. This may lead to a failure of the system.

• A2: The PC-Version does not perform a correct storage of street names.

• A3: On the Sun the input of Umlaut leads to a failure.


Analysis (2)

• From the queries and possible error documents key words are extracted which represent them.

• The comparison uses a thesaurus for synonyms or quasi synonyms, indicated by the colours (e.g. crash and failure).

• Next similarities are computed and answer 3 is immediately excluded (because of sun versus pc and street names versus Umlaut).

• Answer 1 is the nearest neighbor because this occurs more often (this is particular knowledge contained in the similarity measure !).


Quasi Synonyms (Example)

Work station

Failure

PC

Computer

Sun

Crash

Storage InputWin3.1

Quasi synonyms are “almost” synonyms


Customer Support & Automatic Hotline• Hotline for customer support over telephone• How is the operator supported ?• FAQ-collections constitute the case base• If the problem is easy to solve or is familiar to the

operator no call to the case base is necessary• In the many „exceptional“ situations the CBR-Engine

searches in FAQ-base in order to find the most useful one. The document is presented or explained to the customer.

• The solution adaptation can very often be performed best by the operator.

• WWW-applications for customer queries extend this technique: There is no operator any more.


First and Second Level Support

• A company selling printers maintains a call center with several agents solving product-related problems by phone. Most of the problems are simple to solve but the volume of the daily calls is very high. – To provide the necessary staff for the call center, the

company has hired several part-time agents who should be able to solve most of the simple calls directly.

– For more advanced problems, the company maintains a highly qualified second-level support team of product specialists.

The CBR system should empower the first-level support agents to solve as many problems as possible on the phone without forwarding the call to the second-level support.


Main Targets and Advantages

• Call avoidance by avoiding repeated questions (“standard errors”)

• Each call requires less time• Continuously available• These save costs for supplier and customer ! (Time for

conversation and/or repair etc.)• Continuous (and partially automatic) extensions and

updates (task for knowledge management).


HOMER - Hotline with ExperienceCAD Car Development in Sindelfingen

DaimlerChryslerAktiengesellschaft

Research and TechnologyNew Media and Services

FT3/KL

Example from Industry


Service Problems

Intelligent Support at the Help-Desk=

Reduction of downtime

• The number of employees at the hotline remains.• Number of users, Hardware & Applications grows.• Hotline experts have different skills.• Applications are complex and dynamic.• Experts construct solutions again and again over time.• Applications are time-critical.• Users are unsatisfied


Solution: Homer

• Support Experts are searching online for solutions.

• Homer is available on every PC in the Intranet.

• Integration into the Calltracking-Solution.

• Client / Server based (CBR-Server / Java-Interface).

• Available on all Hardware and Software platforms.

Case-Based Hotline with the CBR-Works Support Center:


DaimlerChryslerThe Intelligent Hotline (I)

“Our hotline operations rely on the knowledge and the experience of experts. CBR-Works helps us to utilize this human capital efficiently and effectively.”

Thomas Pantleon, CAD/CAM Support, DaimlerChrysler AG


DaimlerChryslerThe Intelligent Hotline (II)

•EP/QDF Support for CAD-Workstations for:

•600 CAD-Clients (growing up to 1300 CAD-Clients),

•16 Applications (growing up to 38 applications),

•33% of the Hardware is replaced every year.

•Each Software has 1 major and 4 minor updates per year.

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000

Unix clients (AIX, HPUX, IRIX)

Mainframe


DaimlerChryslerThe Intelligent Hotline (III)

• More than 1200 UNIX workstations used for CAD/CAM, more than 20 different software applications

• High costs of hotline operations: 600 complex problems to be solved per month at Sindelfingen only, many more worldwide

• HOMER system: CBR takes customer’s problems and compares them to already-known problem cases

• When there is no direct solution, the user is guided interactively to a new one

• System is available for every hotline employee • Expected yearly savings: $600.000 for passenger and utility

cars• HOMER as part of an ESPRIT project (INRECA II)• System based on CBR-Works from tec:inno GmbH


DaimlerChryslerThe Intelligent Hotline (IV)


DaimlerChryslerThe Intelligent Hotline (IV)

CBRWorks-Server

HOMER-Server

Homer-Client(Appletviewer)

Homer-Client(Appletviewer)

CQL (Case Query Language)

TCP/IP

Architecture :


Homer Results

• Customer: •Faster Troubleshooting.

• Less „Downtime“.• More efficient production.

• Daimler Benz Support:• Known solutions are online available.• Effective training of new employees• Improve quality of the support• Prepared for eventual update problems• Knowledge transfer between DC departments• Savings

Available: Since winter 1998


Partially Automatic Hotlines

• Idea: Two phases:– The first phase is fully automatic. The customer describes the

problem in a query and obtains the desired information if possible.– If the problem is not solved a human agent is called in the second

phase in order to solve solve the problem.

• If the phase actually occurs then the human agent can be similarity based selected using the information obtained in the first phase from the customer.

• The similarity now relates the query and the expert; the nearest neighbor to the query is best available expert.

• Observe: These phases are not the same as in first and second level support (which are different phases!)


Example: SIMATIC Knowledge Manager

• Customers use a www site to describe the problem in terms of– a textual query– some information of the domain and the devices involved.

• By similarity based retrieval the most useful document is presented to the customer.

• There are three types of documents:– FAQ’s: Contain well established knowledge– User information notes: Are less reliably– Informal notes: Draft notes which give informal hints and may be

unreliable.


SIMATIC KM (FAQ 241)Title: Order numbers of CPUs

with which communication is possible.

Question: Which order numbers must the S7-CPUs have to be able to run basic communications with SFCs?

Answer: In order to participate in communications via SFCs without a configured connection table, the module needs the correct order number. The following table illustrates which order number your CPU must have to be able to participate in these S7 homogeneous communications.


SIMATIC Knowledge Manager

www.ad.siemens.de

CBR-Server

Structure

Information about the

Structure of the

SIMATIC Information

System

Order No.

Relation

order numbers

-productnames

Dictionary

InformationEntities

Similarities

Similarity model

Documents in the Customer SupportInformation System

SearchResults

View Document


SIMATIC Knowledge Manager

www.ad.siemens.de

Customer SupportInformation System

SearchResults

View Document

CGI-Client


CD2WEB

Search on CD Search on the Web


The R4-Cycle for the SIMATIC KM

Retrieve:

Determine most useful documents(s).

Reuse:

Apply knowledge from document

Revise:

Evaluate the informationfrom document.

Retain

Add document..

Ret

riev

e

Retain FAQ’smanuals

Knowledge

query

queryRetrieveddocuments

Answer

Customerproblem

Hotline staffsolves problem

No solution found

New document

Revise

Solution found

Reuse


Summary

• After sales service is an important part of CRM• It deals with all parts of problems arising after the product

is delivered.• Problems for the customer arise mostly unforeseen

– the customer should know what to do and where to ask– service should be immidiate and continously available– answers should be correct and understandable

• The problems are mostly not of logical but of approximation character: Similarity reasoning applies.

• After sales service is so far the successful domain of CBR-applications.