TABLE OF CONTENTS palmOne, Inc. makes products used by customers around the world. To further strengthen relationships with its customers while improving its bottom line, palmOne turned to the Kontiki Delivery Management System (DMS). Kontiki (www.kontiki.com) gives palmOne better customer support at lower cost by automating the delivery of video-based set-up guides for its products. These video guides give customers easy-to-follow demonstrations covering common support inquiries. They are available around the clock around the world, which represents a step up in service and a step down in cost.
For makers of handheld computing devices, the most necessary feature is ease of use. palmOne broke through in this marketplace in the 1990s with a combined hardware-software solution with an intuitive interface that revolutionized the market for personal digital assistants (PDAs). Competition and technology improvements have driven the price of the PDAs down while adding more features. This attracted countless new customers who were new to the world of PDAs and often technophobic. In turn, this drove up call volumes to palmOne s support center. Calls were often longer and hence more expensive. As competitive pressure and technological breakthroughs drove down the price of palmOne products, these calls represented an ever increasing drain on the bottom line. palmOne considered and rejected remedies such as phone trees because of low customer satisfaction with such methods.
For palmOne, many customer calls focused on how to set up and perform a HotSync operation that transfers information between the PDA and a desktop computer. palmOne...
