Enhancing Information Retrieval Capabilities of Knowledge Management Systems

An Overview Of User Services

Providing appropriate service to customers or users (the terms are used interchangeably in this chapter) is an important component of any business and the majority of organizations strive to provide excellent service to their customers. The role of the user services or help desk (the terms will be used interchangeable in this chapter) is to provide support and help to users by providing information about the operation of products as well as resolving problems encountered by the user (Göker & Roth-Berghofer, 1999) in the continuous operations of the product (i.e., providing support for problem resolution). Marcella and Middleton (1996) define the help desk as “an accessible service point” (p. 4) that gives solutions on request to solve users’ or help seekers’ problems. Support services can be broadly classified into two types: internal support systems (i.e., providing support to the users within an organization) and external support systems (i.e., providing support to external customers) (Gonzalez, et al., 2005) depending upon the type of customer they support. There are a number of channels (e.g., telephone based support services, email-based help desk system, etc.) called “touch points” for the customer to interact with service providers (Anton, 2000) and seek help from experts to solve their problems. The telephone-based support system has been the dominant method of communication in the past, but with the advent of the Internet and development of email-based technology, email-based help support systems are of growing importance (Nenkova & Bagga, 2003).