For one, there's an increasing use of forum-based support from people like Michelle Long, a QuickBooks expert who operates Long for Success and M. Long Consulting in Lees Summit, Mo. She notes that there are two kinds of forums, those in which experts support consumers, such as QuickBooks users, and the professional gatherings in which the pros provide advice to each other.

The advice given to the consumers can be shaky. "Sometimes I look at the answers other people provide, it's not right," she says. But when it comes to the business end, "As professionals, we know who we trust and who we don't," she says. If a professional gives incorrect advice, that person is likely to get hammered by comments from others.

However, for John Sapp, sales and marketing VP for Drake Software, the issue is still about answering telephone calls quickly. "Our standards are so high that we try to answer every call in less than 10 seconds that takes a lot of people. It works out pretty well," he says.

On October 1, Drake is scheduled to open a call center in Hayesville, N.C., joining facilities in the state at Sylva and the one at headquarters in Franklin. The facility holds up to 25 customer service representatives per shift. Although some companies provide Web-based knowledgbases, Sapp has reservations about them. "There's nothing more frustrating than trying to search through a database and find an answer to a question," he says. "If you can't a real person on phone it will drive you crazy."

One of the strengths of the Drake system is that it has many seasonal workers who join it each year for tax season, and who are key to making the system work since they understand its software.

It's that familiarity-breeds-expertise attitude that has two leaders of CCH's support effort pushing for more permanent workers, although the company still needs temporary workers to handle peak call periods.

"We have begun to hire more permanent reps," say Mike Swiney, managing director of customer service for research support. "We've really pushed for this." Temps are brought in about two months before they are needed and trained. Still, there's no substitute for experience personnel. "They have knowledge in their head, they don't have to search for it," he continues.

The "we" in this case are Swiney and  Allen Murdock, who heads the software support area. But increasingly, the two find their needs growing more similar, and CCH is starting to provide training across the two groups. That way customers don't need to worry about whether they called the right group and last year, the two implemented the same call center technology. Swiney describes the vendor, Interactive Intelligence, as a mid-level player in the call-center business that often is the first to introduce innovations.

The technology system provides the ability for Swiney and Murdock to see the calls the other has received.

Beyond that, support has moved beyond calls. "We don't think about calls. We think about contacts. You may IM us. You may want to chat with us, email us or go to a Web site and open a ticket," he says. The new systems enables one person take handle the contacts from whatever method the end user takes.

CCH also implemented a knowledgbase after "three years ago customers pushed us to access our knowledgbase," he says. The result was an online database that gives visitors access to the same information that tech support reps have.

In the case of Thomson-Reuters, the peer-based support provided by Web-based communities and forms is nothing new. Its users have been trading advice for years on the Accountants Resource Network Exchange (ARNE), which had its origins as a bulletin board but which is now accessed via the company's Web page. The primary support channels are phone, email and a knowledgbase, but ARNE is important.

"The ARNE community is definitely our users reaching out there, not just for information about software, but about professional situations," says Scott Fleszar, vice president of strategic marketing.

Thomson provides access to its knowledgbase for users of its CS Professional Suite and it also offers links that feed information into products. Each product has a "home page" into which the company can push messages.

"For UltraTax, we might say 'An IRS service center is down' or that 'We will have an update out within the next two days,'" says Fleszar.

Intuit provides in-product support from the opposite direction. Contact-sensitive links in consumer and business applications enable consumer and professional users to reach out electronically to Intuit's electronic Live Community, the venue with many different forums, that Michelle Long finds addictive for professionals who provide advice to consumers.

The different product forums are also addictive for Intuit which finds that community-based support is both satisfying to users and very cost-effective for the company because it prevents the need for many support phone calls to its three U.S. call centers.

"Last tax season, 94 percent of the technical support questions in Live Community were answered by other users," says Intuit spokesman Richard Walker. That percentage stems from the answers provided to 12,000 posts on the Lacerte and ProSeries forums, posts that had 650,000 views. Live Community can also be accessed via the Web, although most questions reach the forums from inside the software products.

Intuit has had Live Community for three years. A significant amount of peer support also occurs via Tax Almanac, www.taxalmanac.org, an Intuit website that has about 15,000 tax threads posted with views running into the millions during the year.

Last year, it added the Intuit Virtual Agent to the support mix. Also available via the Web or from within software, IVA enables customers to post questions in conversational English with the system searching the Intuit knowledgebase and Live Community for answers. Users can initiate a chat session with an Intuit support rep at any time.