You Rang, Erlang, and the Poisson Problem
By Bob Kaehms
Twenty questions is a great game. It teaches analytic skills, the importance of context, and deductive reasoning. My wife and I play it with our kids on almost all road trips. Although today's customer support (CS) personnel are experts at this game, software now exists that helps reduce the number of questions asked to first-line support personnel.
While preparing for this month's issue I ran across Phil Verghis' Help Desk FAQ, (www.philverghis.com/helpdeskfaq.html) and had an opportunity to ask him a few questions. Phil became interested in help-desk software back in the early 90s, when Answer Computers was creating Apriori, one of the first help-desk applications, and Mark Ackerman was cultivating answers at MIT's Center for Coordination Technology (see Dave Sims' feature story, "You Asked For It," for more info).
Although I had at least 20 questions to ask Phil, we stalled on one of the critical problems of customer support. As Phil explains, businesses generally view support as an expense instead of a profit center, so they don't allocate appropriate resources. To boot, they generally still don't ask the right questions when setting up support centers.
When I asked if the problems were similar to those associated with security, Phil said:
"The difference is that most know security is a hard technical problem and few consider CS as such.
