InformationWeek

BellSouth, Compaq, and Toshiba plan to adopt the service. Dell Computer already uses it, under the name Ask Dudley, on its Web-support site. Dell says the technology helps customers find answers to problems more quickly because the service lists only potential answers to questions. When a customer uses other apps to search a site for a particular keyword, such as "monitor," the search engine will pull up every page-possibly thousands of them-that happens to contain that word. "Most customers don't have time for that," says Manish Mehta, Dell's online support senior manager.

Dell's call-center reps have even taken to using the technology to answer hard questions from customers. The company can also monitor which questions are being asked and missed so it can identify customers' concerns and add appropriate answers to the database.

But despite its promise, the technology can be difficult to use and needs to improve its ability to answer questions: "Even if you're getting 75% of the questions right, you're still getting 25% of them wrong," says Paul Hagen, an analyst with Forrester Research.

Ask Jeeves is also developing the Ask Jeeves Answer Network, a service that will pool answers from many companies. If a Dell customer asks a question that's better aimed at Microsoft, for instance, Dell can pull the answer from the Microsoft knowledge base, rather than referring the customer to Microsoft's home page.

Ask Jeeves Corporate Question-Answering Service is available now. Pricing varies, but the average contract-which includes a license, a monthly subscription, and professional services-will run from $300,000 to $400,000.