Developed for Fused Solutions' outsourced support offering, KnowPlex is designed to run all aspects of customer care—with a particular focus on maintaining an in-depth and well-scripted knowledgebase.

by Jeff Goldman [February 8, 2006]

Fused Solutions is a subsidiary of Nicholville, N.Y.-based Nicholville Telephone Company—it was spun off in 2002 Nicholville's ISP subsidiary, Slic Network Solutions. Fused Solutions' main focus lies in providing outsourced customer support services for ISPs.

KnowPlex (877) 754-2998 sales@fusedsolutions.com

Mark Cornett, Fused Solutions' President and General Manager, says the company has also expanded beyond providing support just for ISPs. "We're now doing support for network appliances, and for all forms of Internet access, including MDUs," he says. "We've also begun doing tech support for proprietary software—and we've started to do support for enterprise clients in the area of Microsoft Office and similar applications."

Recently, Cornett says, the company began offering its proprietary helpdesk system, KnowPlex, as a software product. The transition to that offering, he says, was gradual. "Two or three years ago, we started doing more co-sourcing, where we share the support process with our clients and they access KnowPlex from an agent's usability perspective—their internal agents have the same access to KnowPlex as our internal agents here," he says.

And more recently, Fused Solutions has begun offering KnowPlex as a standalone helpdesk software solution, without the "co-sourcing" setup—Cornett says the company currently has three clients using the software that way. "We never really set out to be a shrink-wrapped software company, but we kept getting inquiries," he says.

Scripted support
KnowPlex's key strength, Cornett says, is its scripted knowledgebase, based on more than 750,000 trouble tickets collected over Fused Solutions' years of supporting ISP clients. "All Level 1 issues are scripted, because these are the common ones, the ones that account for 80 percent of your call volume," he says. "They have consistent resolutions, and you don't need a highly technical person to deliver that support."

The 20 percent of issues that don't fit into that easily scripted category then get escalated to a Level 2 or Level 3 agent with a higher level of expertise and training. "KnowPlex helps these companies avoid the high cost of highly technical people to answer Level 1 questions, and it brings some consistency to their support process," Cornett says.

The knowledgebase is most appropriate, Cornett says, for clients running an operation that's similar in structure to Fused Solutions itself. "We're a small call center by call center standards—we're a 35-seat call center," he says. "We have 50-some clients today, and obviously, each of those clients is relatively small. The point is that we operate in a shared-agent environment—our agents are not dedicated."

Each agent, then, can't be expected to keep each client's requirements in his or her head. "So the scripting aspect to KnowPlex allows us to define a custom-tailored support process for each of our clients, and to deliver that in a very consistent manner, because our agents are basically just reading and following the scripts," Cornett says. "The whole flow of diagnosis and resolution is built into the knowledgebase."

Knowledge and flexibility
Jeff Yette, the company's Director of Solutions Development, says Fused Solutions' experience in the industry makes KnowPlex all the more valuable. "Out of the gate, the ISP that just installed it now has 30-some customized scripts which all jump out to over 500 completely branded walkthroughs," he says. "When they install it, the application brands all the walkthroughs with all of their technical information."

That gives an ISP the ability to support a wide range of applications, even if it doesn't have that expertise in-house. "If an ISP doesn't have a lot of Macintosh people internally, with our stuff, they have all of the Macintosh connectivity issues and e-mail issues—and it's the same across the board, with all the e-mail clients," Yette says. "All that information is available, for all common e-mail and operating systems."

Those scripts, Cornett says, can also be easily customized using a simple GUI application. "If the ISP offers some ancillary service that wouldn't fall into the generic core set of an ISP knowledgebase—maybe it's a data backup service, or something like that—they could very quickly build out a diagnosis tree and the resolutions for the FAQs associated with that application," he says.

Business rules processing, Cornett says, is another key strength of the application. "If they want certain actions taken under different situations on an automated basis, we have that functionality built into KnowPlex," he says. "If, say, every time a dialup subscriber calls in about connection speeds, they'd like us to automatically send out an e-mail promoting their broadband offering, that's simple to do in KnowPlex."

Pricing and scalability
KnowPlex is available both on a hosted and a licensed basis. In both cases, after an initial setup fee, the pricing is structured per seat. With the hosted option, unlimited upgrades are included. With a purchased license, the first major upgrade is free—after that, the client has to repay the initial license fee in order to receive additional upgrades. "The development cycle is fairly long—it's 18 to 24 months between major revisions," Yette says.

Still, Cornett says the whole licensed software option is new enough that all pricing is very flexible. "We're not a shrink-wrapped software outfit," he says. "We really look at it on a situation-by-situation basis."

With Windows Advanced Server and a SQL database back-end, Cornett says, KnowPlex is extremely scalable. Still, he says scalability shouldn't be an issue for Fused Solutions' clients, most of whom have less than 100 seats in their call center. "I don't see this selling into large-scale operations," he says. "Large call centers are probably not going to be a good fit."

The end user interface, Yette says, is Flash-based—which means any operating system that supports Flash can run KnowPlex. "We've been doing it on Linux machines, Windows machines, in Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, Internet Explorer—and we've got people that have been running the Flash file directly through a Flash player," he says.

While Focus Solutions has never focused on software sales, Cornett says, the company is finally starting to realize that it has something unique to offer. "We've got a diamond in the rough here that works great for our operation, and we continue to develop it," he says. "It helps us do what we think is a pretty stellar job at tech support."

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