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Dermalogica is a global organisation that produces a range of skin-care products. The company forms part of the Dermal Group of Skin Companies that is focused on educating people on achieving optimum skin health. Dermalogica’s product offering spans all areas of skin care and is sold by its 50 sales representatives based throughout the UK. Each salesperson is responsible for a specific region and is required to travel between numerous skin care centres.
THE CHALLENGE: ADMINISTERING AND SUPPORTING REMOTE PCS WHILE DECREASING COSTS AND INCREASING PRODUCTIVITY
To make its business model as efficient as possible, Dermalogica supplies each salesperson with a PC so that they can access office email and all relevant documents from home. Responsibility for the maintenance of these PCs falls on four technicians who comprise Dermalogica’s IT support team. The support team used to provide assistance over the phone by talking the reps through various problems to find a solution. According to Simon Winsall, IT manager at Dermalogica UK, “administering PCs used to be incredibly time consuming. If we wanted to update software on a PC or investigate potential errors, we had no choice but to send couriers the length and breadth of the country to collect the machines. This was an incredibly costly process and had the added drawback of leaving the affected salesperson without a PC for any time between two days and a week, depending on the severity of the problem.”
The rising cost of using couriers and the resulting negative impact this had on productivity caused the team to look for a remote-support tool that would enable them to provide an intermediate level of assistance. “We needed something that we could easily use to take control of problem PCs and carry out repairs without having to leave the office,” explains Winsall. “We looked at remote-support solutions currently on the market. We ruled out pcAnywhere™ since it requires software to be loaded on the host PC and firewall reconfiguration. We also contemplated another solution, but found that it was too complex a solution with hardware required on the server.”
IMPLEMENTING CITRIX GOTOASSIST
Winsall then turned to Citrix® GoToAssist™. “GoToAssist is so straightforward. All we need to do is download the small piece of software and when the user requires a connection, remotely gain access to the PC and do whatever is required to get the machine working properly again,” says Winsall. “We also use GoToAssist to perform ongoing maintenance on our salespeople’s PCs. This includes mundane, yet essential tasks such as updating anti-virus software or administering software updates.”
Winsall and his team have also found GoToAssist to be a useful training aid. “The screen-sharing function of GoToAssist means that we can talk our salespeople through various issues to educate them on the best practice, and the chat function works so well that we don’t always need a supporting teleconference,” explains Winsall. “GoToAssist has certainly proved to be a valuable, interactive training tool.”
For Winsall, investing in GoToAssist has been money well spent: “GoToAssist meets our support needs perfectly. It has increased our productivity and enabled us to offer a far more efficient support service to the sales team,” he says. “GoToAssist also offers excellent value – we’ve had the service for four months now and it's already comfortably paid for itself.”
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