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Get Instant Customer Service on the Web

Compaq bundles WebEx collaboration tool with its servers, helping you interact with real live human beings.

By Alexandra Barrett, PCWorld   

The Web should allow you to interact right now with a customer service, tech support, or sales representative--talking, having online chats, receiving documents or video clips, or doing anything else that's helpful and that today's fancy communication tools allow.

Taking a step in this direction, Compaq this week announced that it will integrate Web-based real-time collaboration technology from Internet start-up ActiveTouch for use in its customer care solution, NetACD.

Equipped with ActiveTouch's WebEx server technology, forthcoming versions of NetACD should allow users to perform tasks such as real-time document exchange and remote system control, all through a standard browser.

"WebEx is the next big step up from e-mail and chat," says Praful Shah, ActiveTouch vice president of business development.

Compaq bundles NetACD with its Windows NT server systems, so WebEx should come as no extra cost to customers.

Without WebEx, "Compaq's NetACD is a restrictive way to connect person A to person B," says Shah. In order for NetACD to work correctly, software must first be installed on a remote user's machine, and it will not work if a user is behind a firewall. But with WebEx, "you don't need to do anything," says Shah. "I have a browser, you have a browser, and boom! We're communicating."

Jim Johnson, chair of the market research firm The Standish Group, likes WebEx's no-plug-in approach, which it achieves by writing its pages in JavaScript. And, he says, WebEx's integrated voice and video capabilities can let you engage in "video-type conference calls."

But to use WebEx's more sophisticated tools, like application sharing, "you need a better [communications] infrastructure than most people have," Johnson warns.

ActiveTouch also offers WebEx collaboration as a free service from webex.com, where anyone can sign up and conduct Web-based meetings.

Any business with a big customer service component should take a serious look at WebEx technology, Johnson adds. "There's a lot of utility in this type of product, and in the end, it gives you greater speed and cuts costs."