Entering The Cloud of Karma

Computers need fixing. So do mobile devices, MP3 players, printers and software applications. Not everyone is a technology expert, and as the growing proliferation of IT devices continues to drag us forward into the future and thus the impending singularity, customer service solutions are just becoming a part of daily life. Has the screen of your tablet PC started to malfunction? Perhaps your iPod Nano has access to over one thousand songs but only plays random tracks from U2’s Achtung Baby album. That’s weird, and people need to fix it. Even more embarrassing situations need remedying: viruses and malware infections. Just like our bodies need doctors, machines need their own care professionals.

iYogi is a customer relationship management (CRM) company based in India, created to fill demand in the underserved tech support market. It provides remote customer service solutions to a wide range of products. Every hour of every day of the week, tech specialists are available to provide support to iYogi subscribers through various methods of communication including live chat and remote management. It provides troubleshooting, virus removal, data backup, networking help, the whole shebang. Optimized through the use of NICE Systems efficiency solutions, iYogi has created a great platform for tech support.

That platform is now available to be used inhouse for companies to provide their own specific brand of customer service. The Digital Services Cloud gives subscribers access to the tools for offering their customers tech support with their name on it.

"The platform we run our company on has been improving over the last five years. Some customers want to just buy that for less," Larry Gordon, iYogi’s global president of channel sales, explains. "What we layer on top of that is this enormous knowledge base built on particular analysis of what tech support is.”

The Digital Services Cloud, however, shares the brunt of its cloud space with Salesforce.com (News - Alert). If things go as planned, this won’t be an issue. iYogi’s hopes are leaning toward the cloud service becoming a specialty tool that allows remote PC maintenance.