Many successful companies like Lawson Software, Rational, and Microsoft have seen the benefit of adding remote support capabilities to their overall support infrastructure. Remote Support gives the Technical Support Representative (TSR) real-time access to a customer’s computer without physically traveling to the customer location. With the right remote support capabilities, the TSR can troubleshoot and solve complex issues much faster than conventional resolution mechanisms, such as explaining steps over the phone or expensive on-site visits.

If you are looking to add Remote Support solution to your TSR’s tool kit, you need to consider following criteria relative to the needs of your support organization:

On-premise Installation or Hosted Service: The first thing to consider is the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of an on-premise installed solution versus a hosted model. In addition to typical TCO impacts like ongoing software upgrade and maintenance investments, there are also factors like:

1. Performance: Are your customers and support team both geographically dispersed. Will your current network infrastructure let you reach every customer with better performance than that a service provider’s globally distributed data centers sitting directly over an Internet backbones?
   
2. Scalability: How important is it for you to quickly and easily respond to increases in customer demand? Will you get the type of flexibility and responsiveness you need from an internal implementation or from your service provider? Depending on your IT infrastructure and the responsiveness of your software vendor, a service provider can offer a more flexible support capacity.
   
3. Reliability: How important is it for you to provide always-accessible support? What types of contingency plans & processes do you have in place to guarantee uptime during simple maintenance windows and in more extreme cases of disaster recovery? Some service provides have sophisticated back-up systems to deliver always-up support capabilities.

Client-Server or Browser Based: Client-Server remote access solutions are rapidly becoming legacy applications with high costs of deployment and maintenance and significant computer resource consumption. Moreover, if your help desk supports external constituents who are outside your firewall, it is impractical to use. Downloading and installing the client software and negotiating opening ports in firewall of customer’s company can take days if not weeks. A browser-based solution allows a TSR to establish a remote access solution in a few minutes.

Security: Security tends to be a critical element of any support solution, and is particularly crucial when providing customer support. Be sure to evaluate:

• Encryption capabilities: You should expect industry standard 128-bit encryption.
  
• Granularity in control and access levels: View or control the customer’s entire desktop or only specifically approved applications.
  
• Permission-based access: Before any action that has impact on the customer’s machine, approval mechanisms can be put in place.
  
• Firewall compliance: Does the solution work over standard ports or do you have to open new holes in the firewall?

Transfer/Conference: Often, TSRs will need to enlist the help of a Subject Matter Expert (SME) or to escalate the situation to another TSR. Does the solution support multiple TSRs in same session? Can you transfer a session without requiring customers to re-connect again?

Record Session: A recorded remote support session provides a built-in audit mechanism and can also be used for as multi-media content for training and self-service. When evaluating integrated recording and editing capabilities, ask the following questions: Can it record an audio telephone session? How large are the recordings? Is it easy to use the editor?

Video: If your product relies on complex hardware configurations, you might want to consider a solution that provides the ability to view videos from a web cam attached to customer’s machine. In addition, a video image of TSR can help personalize the support session.

Transfer File: The ability to transfer large files back and forth is also essential in technical support. Make sure the solution can support large files efficiently.

In closing, a good remote support solution will dramatically improve your TSR productivity, increase your customer satisfaction levels, and reduced your cost of operations. Use the above criteria to make a choice you and your company won’t regret.

About the author
Jack Chawla is Product Manager of WebEx Support Center. To learn more about WebEx Support Center, visit http://www.webex.com.