Efficient Internet Chat Services for Help Desk Agents

This paper presents a model for "help desk chat" which is distinct from the "buddy-list" model for the conventional collaborative chats. Help desk chat includes several distinct capabilities including scheduling and routing functionality, archival of problem resolution sessions, integration with ticketing databases, unification with knowledge management systems, and efficient interfaces for agents to effectively handle and multi-task several chat sessions. The main motivation is to provide an alternate channel to voice calls that increases help desk agent efficiency while improving end user satisfaction. By implementing an end to end help desk chat system and piloting it in a large global enterprise, we demonstrate that help desk chat indeed meets these goals. Analysis results over numerous help desk chat transcripts quantitatively show the effectiveness of chat over voice across key help desk performance indicators including first call resolution, average speed to answer, average call duration, extent of multi-tasking, and end user satisfaction.