CMC Lab: Another genius business idea?

Monday, October 25, 2004

Another genius business idea?

Ok, here's another business idea, sprung from the mother of all invention: necessity.

People in today's business world need technical support; it's a fact. Big businesses can usually afford to hire a tech team for their own company, but what about the small businesses of America? Don't they deserve technical support? The idea here is to have a general technical support team that covers varying aspects of business computing (we would upgrade our capacities and knowledge base as we grew). Then these small businesses pay a small fee per month or year to get unlimited access to these services. They'd type in a business PIN on the phone and be able to use our technical support.

An alternative/parallel idea would be to have simply free customer service, with advertising while they waited on hold, rather than stupid muzak. We'd have to try to limit the accessibility to the service somehow, though. A probable way of doing this is requiring a signup feature online that generates the user's PIN. If we can manage to weed out all but actual businesses, we'd probably get some good advertising rates, as well.

One of the best aspects of this idea is the relatively low cost of implementation. Aside from general infrastructure (like phone lines, etc.), the labor would be cheap, thanks to the tech bubble burst, which has left hundreds if not thousands of over-qualified tech people jobless. Also, the level of genius doesn't have to be amazing: we could probably even use college kids who have the same qualifications as an LTA. We can even include in our marketing that all our representatives live in the United States (not India), which may be a selling point.

Alright, Claremont brains, let's here what you got to say about this.

1 Comments:

Blogger Dollars and $ense said...

I think there are already firms that do this for companies. Toshiba offers a similar service, but they are vertically integrated so that they can sell computers to a company and then offer tech support for that entire company. if you get enough companies, it's the same idea, you just don't have to train people on all sorts of different computers, meaning that they can exploit economies of schale better. I like the idea of offering some sort of free service however, but some of those calls can take hours, and if we don't have enough people to help out, we will be in the negatives for a long while, and I think that form of advertising is the same thing as spamming. Esp when people are going to depend on reliable service as quickly as possible, but if we did that, we wouldn't have time to sell our ads.

At the same time, I think that something like this could work for smaller companies. Maybe we could even make it web based so that we can avoid the high phone bills. If it is hardware problems, (which it will often be) then we will not be able to offer much, but as far as software goes, you're right, our techs would not need that much training. Developing...

October 25, 2004 at 4:38 PM

 

Post a Comment

<< Home