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Technology Stocks : Dell Technologies Inc. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: D. Swiss who wrote (85360)	12/15/1998 9:31:00 AM
From: Mohan Marette	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 176387

Ask Dudley. Hi Drew: You seen this? ====================================================== Source:TechWeb Customers Can Ask Dudley On Dell Website (12/14/98, 7:02 p.m. ET) By Malcolm Maclachlan, TechWeb Dell gained a reputation as a pioneer in direct PC sales, and now it hopes to revolutionize the customer relationship by adding a new service to its website. On Monday, Dell unveiled its Ask Dudley service, based on the "Natural Language" software behind the Ask Jeeves search engine. Ask Dudley lets visitors search from among Dell's 50,000 pages of customer-support material. As with Ask Jeeves, Ask Dudley permits questions in simple English, such as "Where can I find specifications for my keyboard?" Dell spends hundreds of millions of dollars on customer support every year, said Rob Wrubel, CEO of Ask Jeeves, so the PC maker is a prime candidate for cost reduction. Many solutions to computer problems are hard to explain over the phone, but are simplified with diagrams and other printed material. Dell already had a wealth of such materials, he said, but they were scattered across its website and intranet. In creating Ask Dudley, Dell organized these materials and added new ones. "Companies are beginning to see that with their interaction with the customer, the Web is going to be their primary point of contact," Wrubel said. Part of the idea was to make Web-based customer support less intimidating, said Wrubel. The service is named after an actual customer-support engineer at Dell; a cartoon version of the gray-haired, ponytailed Dudley greets visitors to the site. Ask Jeeves plans to market the service to other companies, although it hasn't fine-tuned the revenue model. Candidates for other Ask-type services includes areas such as health care and financial services, Wrubel said, which involve specialized knowledge that many people find intimidating. Ask Jeeves runs a website directory based on its search software. It is also featured on the Netscape Netcenter portal site, where it offers a specialized search function for kids that filters out adult material.