First, high quality self-service systems are themselves excellent new revenue sources, with customers and partners more often than not willing to pay a subscription fee. Second, they provide such tight control and insight into a customer’s exact situation that they enable both new and traditional add-on services to be presented dynamically at the moment they are most relevant and therefore most likely to be purchased. Finally, they satisfy the customer’s need to see for themselves that paid support is the best alternative by integrating the ultimate directive to engage the company with a preliminary set of alternative do-it-yourself steps. When properly implemented, automated self-service makes the customer feel that they have been given the chance and necessary information to find a cost-effective fix and that they are acting reasonably by ultimately engaging Support after the system has proven that bringing in the cavalry is necessary.

The real game-changer about automated self-service with a system like LogicNets is that you gain unprecedented insight into the customer’s actions and situation and you can precisely control when and how to present the appropriate information in response. In the traditional scenario when break-fix services cost extra, users obviously try to solve issues on their own. Relying on Search as the tool to find information either on the web or in your knowledge-bases, users work manually and in an ad-hoc way to troubleshoot problems. Yet the company has no idea that they are doing this or what approach they are taking… and odds are that the customer is flailing. Typically, the company’s chance to assess the situation and influence only comes after the customer has failed at their initial attempts, concluded that your support materials are worthless, and has now called you as a last resort. At this point they are completely fed up and now have to suffer the indignity of describing to your agent the whole experience they just went through. With automated self service, the customer has followed a standardized and proven process for identifying relevant symptoms, determining causes, and eliminating irrelevant factors. If the company needs to be pulled in, the user is satisfied that they have done everything they can. But even better, all their activities to date have been recorded so that the company’s agent can pick up at the next level without having to ask those annoying redundant questions of the case history. The result is always a happier customer and, it seems to us, more net opportunities to generate revenues as payment for proven proportional value.

We recently spoke to a prospective customer who totally got the benefit of capturing and automating diagnostic workflow as an alternative to the status quo of giving users static PDF-based troubleshooting guides. She briefed her Field Service group on how she could replace their static PDFs and use LogicNets to easily capture and deliver their diagnostics as an interactive process. She very accurately described to the group the advantages of such a system including:

• Guided navigation that would be good enough to give directly to end-users, while flexible enough to support veteran reps who would undoubtedly want to choose from a range of alternative pathways and possibly skip ahead to different steps or end-points.

• Quantitative encoding and management of diagnostics elements, allowing diagnostic processes to be characterized, tracked and managed based on the relationships between symptoms, solution end-points, and resources. This would transform the knowledge-base from a collection of prose (some of it pretty heavy reading), whose usefulness is entirely dependent on Search, into an automated network much easier to navigate, capture, and maintain.

• Heuristic learning where the system itself would keep track of all diagnostics usage to dynamically predict the most probable solutions and marginalize irrelevant pathways over time – i.e. solve the knowledge-base maintenance challenge.

She thought she had everyone on board and then a product manager spoiled the moment. He observed that in customer satisfaction surveys, the company’s diagnostics manuals were “very highly rated” by the users. “That settles it,” declared a manager, “no need to fix what ain’t broke!”

Thankfully, we were able to get a discussion going with the two nay-sayers and we were able to turn them around pretty quickly and effectively. Our argument was simple: “how do you know them user manuals ain’t broke?” We asked how many times their diagnostics manuals had been used in the last year by users and reps. Did they even know if current manuals were being used? Did they have a breakdown by product or diagnostic area? Were they able to identify in complex scenarios which pathways were most successful and did the field have any feedback informing them of evolving improvements? As they tried to answer these questions, they realized that, aside from a SurveyMonkey exercise, they actually knew nothing about how their PDF manuals were used by customers and that with static prose they had no means of closing the interaction loop with a better understanding of product performance and the actual customer experience. We then described how several of our users have intentionally directed reps and customers to use LogicNets Interactive Troubleshooting guides and our Knowledge Center module in place of their traditional manuals. The results have been noteworthy. Not only have users found it easier and more convenient to get to their answers, but every single step they work through is recorded, providing an accurate paper trail and giving reps back the time they used to waste recounting their cases in the CRM system. LogicNets has provided clear and quantitative information about the effort and path taken to solve problems in hundreds and thousands of incidents. Furthermore, with the Predictive Diagnostics module it automatically adjusts to real-world usage, constantly refining the recommend pathways and resources needed to optimally arrive at a solution. This information is also available to Engineering systems providing critical feedback about actual product performance so that proactive maintenance programs can be implemented.

So, we guess the moral is: “if it ain’t broke, don’t mean it ain’t broke!” We actually think that the combination of prose and PDF is the big red flag. Surely if you make your living on technical products, you would understand the limitations of unstructured text and the de facto benefits of automating… especially if it is affordable.

• Technical Support and Field Service
• Environmental Health & Safety, and Risk Management
• Medical Diagnostics
• Sales Process Automation

For those of you who know LogicNets as a Do-It-Yourself interactive design platform for creating expert system applications, nothing has changed. Our Core System still provides a powerful platform for users in any field to easily capture and automate the workflow of even their most sophisticated business processes. However, our new Framework Applications enhance the LogicNets core with a full set of off-the-shelf functionality covering all the peripheral activities that users in specific fields, such as Technical Support, need to set a context for their core activities of performing diagnostics analysis. The result is that Technical Support organizations can deploy LogicNets as a purpose-built application only focusing their LogicNets design efforts on modeling their diagnostics content… all other functionality including navigation, security, user management, user feedback, access to knowledge repositories is delivered fully functional, modified by LogicNets staff to meet their specific requirements as part of product delivery. Since capturing diagnostics workflow in LogicNets is supremely easy, the advent of the Framework Applications means that the cost and effort of using LogicNets with regard to the time and skill levels of designers has been significantly reduced.

The image above shows all the Framework Application modules and components we have now made available, as an example, specifically for Technical Support and Field Service organizations. We’ve developed similar Framework Applications for EHS/Risk Management, Medical Diagnostics and Sales Process Automation. To see any of the Framework Apps, you should request a demo via the LogicNets website.

In summary, the new bundle adds powerful predictive diagnostics, adaptive maintenance and off-line field service support capabilities to our existing troubleshooting automation processes, knowledge management, third-party CRM/knowledge-base connectivity, and mobile device support.

Aaaand breathe.

You can read the full press release on PRWeb. Or visit the updated Tech Support Solutions page on our website.

Patrick brings over 25 years of experience directing global sales, marketing, business development and product strategy in the technology sector. Prior to joining LogicNets he held executive roles at Metalogix Software, Bycast (NetApp), Plasmon, and BridgeHead Software. Throughout this period, Patrick has focused on advanced data and content management, sales, service, and support operations, disaster recovery and business continuance, and regulatory compliance. He holds a Bachelors of Science degree from Harvard University.

A fresh, new look for LogicNets.com

If you hadn’t noticed already, we’ve made a few changes to the website’s layout – we hope you like the new look!

We’re also in the process of updating the content as we integrate new components like Predictive Diagnostics into the LogicNets product hierarchy.

Look out for more changes in the coming days and weeks and as always, if you have any feedback about the site, please don’t hesitate to send it our way. Just look for the Contact Us link at top and bottom of every page. Cheers!

Our new Predictive Diagnostics tool

Happy 2012 to all!

The new year brings with it a sneak peek at our newest product – the Predictive Diagnostics tool. We have to say we’re really pretty darned excited about it here at LogicNets HQ.

We promise we’ll have more details about it on the website soon, but meanwhile we hope you’ll enjoy the demo video.

LogicNets - now with added Google+

Better late than never? Facebook has allowed businesses to set up shop in their social media-verse for quite some time. While we’re still not convinced about the staying power of Google’s +1 concept, the Mountain View behemoth’s recent move to allow businesses to create their own branded Google+ page is a step in the right direction, as they look to play catch up with the king of Friending and Liking.

So without further ado, here is the new LogicNets’ Google+ page. Add us to your circles and post about us as you see fit. Let’s see if Google’s social media efforts will be a long-term positive for everyone.

LogicNets AI - boldly going where no man has gone before

While we continue to work hard on putting everything in place for our next big announcement, we stumbled upon an old-but-revamped piece of news from our friends at NASA, who have clearly been doing some spring cleaning on their website (we like!)

The article covers LogicNets’ work with NASA on development of artificial intelligence for robotic systems in planetary exploration. We like to think we were one step ahead of IBM’s Watson. I mean sure he’s smart, but can he trundle happily across the surface of Mars analyzing his surroundings?  [Full Article]

In case you were wondering why we’ve been quiet these past few weeks, it’s because we misplaced the little piece of paper with all our passwords on it.

OK, not really. We’ve actually been very hard at work getting a couple of new products ready for beta release, and the first of those is now ready to be pushed out the door: LogicNets Mobile.

Yup, you can now run LogicNets apps on your iPhone or Android device [Edit: and iPad too, of course!]. We’ll be providing more details as we continue to test the beta version with select customers, so stay tuned.

We also hope to have news on another very exciting product release in the coming days, so don’t change that channel!