An empirically derived personalisation framework for technical support

Abstract

The increasing complexity of software and frequent changes and updates to new technologies have made technical support (TS) challenging. TS is key to achieving user satisfaction, user loyalty, increased sales and competitive advantage. But these are difficult goals given that TS must satisfy users with different backgrounds and diverse preferences. When providing information they need to adopt services to meet language and cultural preferences in terms of locale (localisation) and in terms of individual user preferences (personalisation). Even though there are efforts to improve TS, the literature shows that customers are not satisfied with current TS services. This paper describes a proposal to develop a set of recommendations for improved TS, with a focus on personalisation. Recommendations are drawn from an empirical evaluation of successful interactions between users in open source TS web forums. A Grounded Theory Method will be applied where best practices, prevalent new implicit requirements and areas that need improving in TS systems can be implied from the analysis of web forum data.