Intelligent web-based helpdesk for customer service support

• Main Author: Liu, Shigong.
• Other Authors: Foo Shou Boon, Schubert
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Computer science and engineering::Information systems
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/42611
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

In a traditional helpdesk environment, service engineers typically provide round the clock support for its world-wide customer-base through long-distance telephone calls and, if necessary, subsequent on-site visits. Such a mode of support is inefficient, ineffective and generally results in high costs, long service cycles and poor service quality. The rapid growth of the World Wide Web technology, with its widespread acceptance and accessibility, has resulted in the emergence of Web-based helpdesk systems. Depending on the functionality provided by such systems, most of the associated disadvantages of the traditional helpdesk environment can be eliminated. This thesis describes the design and development of a prototype Web-based helpdesk system, WebHotLine, for an industrial company as part of a collaborative research agreement with the company. In this project, we first reviewed the literature associated with the diversified areas of helpdesk systems, Web server design, machine translation approaches, and artificial intelligence techniques with the aim of deriving a suitable architecture for WebHotLine. The proposed architecture supports the four main functions of Web-based retrieval of customer service records, multilingual (Chinese and Japanese) translation of English service records, automatic fault diagnosis for improving the advisory process, and real-time Internet video-conferencing for enhanced communication support. The subsequent chapters provides the analysis and implementation details of these four main functions.