Now that the potential benefits IT can bring to organizations are widely recognized, many enterprises are struggling to enhance tech support in order to drive business productivity and performance. They are seeking ways to enable their support reps to accomplish more without pouring new resources into these efforts.
They may soon be rewarded. As top performers in tech support have discovered, new remote support solutions now exist that can virtualize the help desk, delivering compelling gains in terms of rep productivity, customer satisfaction and bottom-line performance.
Through remote desktop access solutions, organizations such as Humana, Hilton, Nissan, PracticeWorks, Ohio State University, and others have transformed their service and support practices from one-to-one interactions to virtualized remote support interactions. This move has dramatically raised productivity and strengthened business operations through:
Reduced on-site visits
Increased first call resolution
Enhanced call handling capacity
Reduced hold and call times
Increased number of support sessions
Such benefits have enabled enterprises to deliver far higher levels of service performance while maintaining or even reducing their investments in additional service personnel. By successfully leveraging remote control software, they have demonstrated that conventional phone-based and in-person approaches to support have become obsolete. But they’ve also proven the powerful impact that virtualized tech support can have on the performance of the business.
Given IT’s strategic role as a business enabler in today’s hyper-competitive economy, enterprises are challenged as never before to fully capitalize on their technology assets. Not only must they ensure their people have access to IT to perform effectively, they must maintain and provision IT in a productive fashion. Pressure on IT performance and availability is increasing.
Unfortunately, IT complexity is on the rise. The Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA) finds that the percentage of members who said their products or applications had climbed to a high level of complexity has risen from 42% in 2003 to 63% at present. It goes without saying that users of highly complex products need more support interaction than users of comparatively simple products. Consequently, customer interaction volumes are rising. Over the last 3 years, support call volumes have increased 111%, according to SSPA. 1
Companies, or departments within organizations, whose reason for existence is to support end users with their technology are faced with some serious challenges. They must increase IT productivity in order to satisfy the productivity demands on business as a whole. They must at the same time increase IT presence. Complicating this demand for more one-to-one interaction with IT is an increasingly mobile workforce whose expectation for fast call resolution is high.
The increasing product complexity and rising need for interaction mean that the current standard IT support practices are woefully inadequate. Failure to adapt to the new environment will make IT a hindrance to business productivity rather than an enabler.
Conventional IT support relies on help desk reps to make in person visits or handle problems over the phone. Unfortunately, this approach severely limits the number of incidents that can be resolved within a given time-frame.
When a rep must travel across a corporate campus (or an even greater distance) to handle a support problem, the rep’s time is tied up for the duration of the trip and the support activity. When a rep must walk an individual through a solution over the phone, the rep’s time is again tied up with a single individual in what will most likely be a slow, cumbersome process.
Rep productivity is hampered whenever the rep’s time is monopolized by a single case – a lengthy service call or a call that requires travel, for example. Enterprises that hope to increase the productivity of their service reps must seek alternatives to traditional tactics, ensuring the time of their reps is not monopolized by single service calls.
Low service levels
Another key issue hindering help desk effectiveness is the frustration conventional approaches to IT support bring to both customers and help desk representatives. Long hold times and call times are a symptom of a poorly managed process.
Given the pace of business today, everyone has high expectations when it comes to getting problems resolved. Patience is thin, particularly when individuals have experienced rapid problem resolutions elsewhere. They have a sense of how quickly IT problems can – and should – be addressed.
