Partnering with Customers Four to five hours of a support engineer's day is spent working with customers on the telephone. Typically the support engineer must do remote detective work to diagnose the problem. Noisy computer rooms, language accents, and technical jargon all contribute to communication breakdowns. The telephone connects the support engineer with the customer across the geographic distance. While customers are clearly motivated to work with the support engineers to solve their problems, working for different companies also means that there is limited trust between the collaborators and constraints on what they can share.
Protective firewalls underscore their technical and organizational separateness.
In designing any technology to address this problem, however, we must consider issues of trust and security. The customer must be in control of what a support engineer can see and do on the customer's workstation. The technology must also work without any extensive installation or download, as customers expect a quick resolution with a minimum of additional effort on their part. The CCC topic groups typically have engineers at all three sites, creating smaller, physically co-located teams within the larger, distributed topic group. Since the team members at the same site have offices located near each other, do not have to worry about time zone differences among them, and have many more ways of encountering and communicating with each other, most of their collaboration occurs within a site.