CIOL launches Tech Expert

Cyber India Online Ltd (CIOL), the IT portal
has entered the online technical support service market with its latest offering
Tech Expert. Tech Expert is India’s first online network for interactive
technical help, support and solutions for all the segments of the IT user
community available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.

In the current scenario, tech help/support
requirements are serviced primarily by traditional sources like IT publications,
vendor resources and user groups. These sources are not able to fully service
the varied support requirements of the rapidly growing IT user community across
home/SOHO, enterprise, governments and the software industry. This has resulted
in the growing gap between user expectations and what is on offer. The Tech
Expert offering from CIOL fills this gap.

For the first time, CIOL’s Tech Expert
offers online help and support to all the four user communities namely tech
enthusiasts, enterprise users, software professionals and the IT industry. To
provide the best service CIOL has put in place a panel of experts, represented
by the best in the IT industry. The experts include QSupport for the enthusiast
segment, Cisco, SAP, IIIT-B, iLantus, neoIT and Talisma in the enterprise
segment, a panel of highly qualified experts in the software professionals
segment and International Data Corporation (India) in the IT Industry segment.

“The unique advantage of Tech Expert is its
comprehensiveness and neutrality. This has helped us to bring together the best
in the business under the common umbrella of Tech Expert,” said Shyam Malhotra,
Executive Director, CIOL.  “It is not often that you see leading names
like Cisco, IDC, SAP, neoIT etc operating from the same platform to provide
online tech support,” he  added.

Tech Expert takes online support services into
an intuitive sphere, which immediately enhances user friendliness. Each segment
has been categorized based on the problems encountered during specific
activities and on the basis of common situations faced while using a particular
product or service. There are 21 combined categories that help users zero in on
to the answers to their queries. The users can either browse through a library
of FAQs or ask the Tech Expert.

Response time from the Tech Expert has been
defined for each of the segments being addressed.  For the enthusiast
segment, the response time is within 24 hours. In the rest of the segments
replies will be sent between two to five days depending on the nature of the
query and the amount of research required.

“We have laid a lot of thrust on increasing
the user friendliness of Tech Expert and have relied on intuitive categorization
that an end user can easily relate to,“ said  E Abraham Mathew,
President, CIOL. Tech Expert is being launched initially as a free service. In
the next phase, paid versions of the service will also be introduced. In the
enterprise and IT industry segments a bid/consultancy model will be introduced
and in the enthusiast and software professional segments subscription/pay per
use model will be introduced.