The Remote Access Opportunity
The Challenge of Remote Support
“Customers unintentionally lie to us, because they don’t understand the questions we’re asking. In complex support, we really need to see what’s going on.” – Manager, Support Center Tools, Enterprise Software Company
Over the past few decades, field service has gradually been replaced by the call center, which has itself evolved into the multichannel contact center. According to IDC, there are 2.5 million agents in 76,000 call centers in the United States alone, and a significant fraction of these provide technical support.
This is a natural outgrowth of the personal computer and Web revolutions, which deliver increasingly sophisticated computing with off-the-shelf desktops and servers. Unlike the mainframe days of old, when lab coat-wearing support experts were as much a part of a hardware installation as raised floors and disk farms, today’s complexity lies in highly configurable integrated application suites. The complexity has migrated from hardware to software. As computer scientists are prone to say, the only difference between software and hardware is that you can send software over a phone line. And so, as complexity moved into the software, it naturally occurred to vendors to provide support over a phone line, too. This translated into much lower costs and much higher scale for support.
But remote support has its drawbacks. Field service technicians were right there: they could listen to disk drive bearings, smell fusing components, and, most importantly, sit at the console and do what they needed to do to diagnose and repair their systems. In contrast, call center TSRs found themselves having to work blind, like an air traffic control center talking an untrained pilot in for a landing. With less technical customers, TSR and customer alike were even more frustrated and less likely to successfully resolve the issue. Remote support provided efficiency, but made it much harder to provide fast and accurate resolutions. Clearly the market needed the efficiency of the centralized support center with the immediacy of field service.
First Steps to Remote Access
“It used to take literally hours to remote connect, from setting up a modem, opening holes in the firewall, installing PCAnywhere, etc. There were ways of doing it, but it would be terrible—making arrangements on the customer site, going to a separate PC, and so on.” – Manager, Support Center Tools, Enterprise Software Company
The first relief from the challenges of supporting products remotely came from a surprising source: IT server management. People running racks of PC-based servers needed a way to log in to them and manage them without having a separate screen for each PC—as a matter of fact, without leaving their desks. This need was intensified by the GUI nature of these PC server environments: no longer could the IT user simply have a command line connection to their servers—they had to see what was on the “screen,” even if the machine didn’t have one. As a result, developers created a series of utilities to allow one computer’s screen to be displayed in a window on another computer, the most widely adopted of which were PCAnywhere and various versions of VNC.
Organizations supporting complex products immediately started using these applications to see what their customers were seeing. While they did help, they did so in a way that wasn’t scalable, efficient, or secure. This is because these products were designed to be used inside a single local area network (LAN)—from an IT staff member’s PC to a server. This architecture resulted in serious issues when used for support:
1. Customer-side footprint. Applications like PCAnywhere required customers to install software on their systems to allow the TSR to connect. At best, this was a time consuming step; at worst, this was impossible because of locked down machines and IT policies designed to manage configurations and avoid malware.
2. Performance requirements. Being designed to work over a high-speed LAN, legacy systems assume levels of bandwidth and connection reliability that is not universally found across the Internet. As a result, they often drop connections and provide frustratingly slow screen refreshes.
3. Security and Compliance issues. Perhaps the most significant drawback of being designed to work on a closed connection is that these systems communicate over proprietary ports—ports that aren’t generally open in security-conscious networks. As a result, these legacy remote access solutions require IT to open holes in the firewall. Many compliance regimes (such as HIPAA, SOX, and PCI) and good security practice simply won’t allow these compromises in the firewall.
