The proliferation of the internet into the home and business market have forever changed the way people view service. For example, buying goods over the internet is no longer a strange concept. Today, when you purchase a computer, it is assumed that it will be connected to the internet in some way; either through a local network or via a modem connection.

This, in turn, has led to the growth of some new computing industries that could not have existed without the advent of the internet. Everybody is familiar with the emerging "dot com" or "ecommerce" business models. This simply means a company is selling goods or providing services via the internet. The eSupport (or electronic support) concept is simply taking the "dot com" concept to the next logical level: providing live technical support over the internet.

Before going into the details of how eSupport works, let us take a look at how support is handled traditionally. In this example, we will focus on PC support exclusively, even though eSupport as a whole is not limited to PC market.

The chart on the right shows a typical technical support call, from start to finish. The numbers on the bar are the duration of each steps expressed in minutes. Depending on the nature of the problem, the support analyst may spend up to sixty minutes waiting for caller to go through the entire diagnostic procedure. Once the analyst have determine the problem, it may take another thirty minutes to fix it, or, in a worse case scenario, reload the operating system from scratch. If we examine a typical support call in greater detail, we will find that most of the time spent in the investigation and diagnostic steps is determining the system's configuration.

With an eSupport infrastructure, the support analyst will be able to reduce the time spent on the phone. It will enable the analyst to quickly identify the caller and basic system configuration, run through some basic system diagnostic remotely, and fix the problem remotely without the end user's intervention.

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