Mumbai: By 2003, the Internet will be the dominant tool used worldwide for the delivery of product support services with around 60 per cent of all inquiries being submitted by the Internet, revealed a joint study by Gartner Group and Dataquest which was presented by Michele Caminos, Gartner's research director at a concluding day of Summit 2000 on e-reality here on Thursday. According to Gartner and Dataquest, by 2001, Web-enabled support tools and features will be used as a competitive differentiator. By 2004, enterprises that deploy Web-enabled support for the sole purpose of reducing customer service costs will not realise their goals and will reduce customer satisfaction. Moreover, by 2004, product vendor Websites will provide support for multi-vendor hardware and software products.According to Caminos, the driving forces for web-enabled support would be faster resolution time, higher customer satisfaction, better efficiencies, cost reduction and above all more sophisticated end user. "Internet will be ubiquitous for web enabled support," he opined. "End to end integration, changing the behaviour of customer, setting customer expectations, interacting with customers in a new way and above all private, security and loss of personalisation are the real challenges which will have to be overcome in delivering Web-enabled support," Caminos said.
Similarly, the future of web-enabled support would rely on self healing capabilities, embedded diagnostics, Internet-enabled training, value added services and resolution tracking software. The rapid evolution of the Internet as a business intermediary and the convergence of voice and date are the two factors driving the adoption of IT and Web-enabled services in India and Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, Gartner's research director Minh Tran while talking on "vertical markets: opportunities for IT services and solutions" said that average solution price (ASP) will be a solution-based strategy for the utilities, distribution and education sectors in the next two years in India.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) will continue to grow both in the manufacturing and business services sectors and will play an important role in the financial sector in the same period. Tran pointed out that e-commerce will dominate most sectors of the Indian economy with the increase in usage.
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