An Analysis of Home Computer Customer Service Hotlines
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Abstract] With the growth of the Internet in recent years, home computers have become an essential part of many Americans' lives. Because computers play such an important role in our lives, even the smallest problem with an individual's computer system can cause severe repercussions in our day-to-day lives. Because of recent surveys done by J.D. Power and Accenture that have measured growing dissatisfaction in customer service across numerous industries, we decided to develop a survey that would address an industry that has often been overlooked by study groups: home computer customer service hotlines. This paper provides the mechanics of our survey, including how it was designed and a summary of the results. This paper also makes recommendations to improve customer satisfaction in the home computer industry. [Keywords] Home computer; customer service; hotline; internet Introduction On the night of Tuesday, April 17, 2007, the telecommunications company Research In Motion (RIM) suffered a massive computer glitch at their networking headquarters in Ontario, leaving millions of Blackberry users across North America without service for at least 12 hours. While the outage occurred during the nighttime hours, some users reported that their Blackberrys were not up and running until late in the afternoon hours the following day. Thus, the outage caused a major disruption in the hectic lives of the many business leaders, politicians, and journalists who relied on the handheld phone/Internet portal to conduct dayto-day business (Mayerowitz, 2007). From a purely non-technical perspective, what is most alarming about this incident was RIM's lack of response to keep their loyal customers notified about what was taking place. As the Blackberrys went silent, so did RIM. When concerned Blackberry users called the company's customer service hotline to inquire about why their devices were idle, their calls went unanswered. In fact, REVI did not even release an official statement until Wednesday, April 18, after the power had been restored. RIM's silence alienated many of its customers, some of whom had their personal and professional lives greatly disrupted by the outage (Hamblen, 2007). Even though the outage has not hurt the company's profit margin (Reardon, 2007), RIM's lack of adequate customer service during the incident has damaged the company's image in the eyes of many users. If RIM does not fix customer communication problems in the future, it risks losing its customers to a competitor. The telecommunications industry is well-known for poor customer service, and this example of not adequately satisfying the customer's needs is not limited to RIM and its immediate competitors. Recent studies by the analyst company Accenture have shown that consumers are increasingly growing weary of poor customer service in almost all major industries. According to a 2005 study by Accenture, almost half (49 percent) of the 2,000 consumers surveyed had changed their service providers in at least one industry due to poor customer service (Dmreview.com Editorial Staff, 2006). In light of Accenture's findings, we decided to conduct our own survey in an attempt to duplicate Accenture's findings. However, because of a lack of resources and time to work with, we narrowed our study to just one section of a particular industry. We focused our study on the effectiveness of home computer customer service hotlines. Why Computer Hotlines? Unlike other multi-billion dollar industries, like the banking or retail markets, the home computer market is relatively young. Before the introduction of the first Macintosh computer in the early 1980s, the idea of a computer that was small and inexpensive enough to be used in homes was unheard of. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, most of the world's computers took up entire rooms and were rarely seen outside of business, governmental, and educational facilities. lust 25 years later, however, it is now unheard of to live in a household without a home computer. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".