Technical Support’s New Mission in an Overwhelmingly Mobile World
Mobile devices are becoming more common than PCs. How is your company helping customers leverage these devices for productivity while at the same time managing the complexity that comes with so many devices and applications?
May 14, 2013
By GoToAssist by Citrix Guest Blog
This year, mobile phones will surpass PCs as the most common web-access device. Worldwide, smartphones will exceed 1.82 billion units – more than one phone for every four living human beings. Mobile devices are the tools we can’t live without. They’ve become a pervasive business necessity. And, every single smartphone, tablet and laptop is loaded with different apps.
This explosion of devices and apps is pushing companies ‒ MSPs and support professionals included ‒ to deeply rethink how they deliver support to people and their technology.
Further complicating this already convoluted picture is the continual birth and merging of new support channels. Customers and employees now seek help from social channels, they initiate chat sessions with support agents and they fend for themselves in forums, they use remote support apps directly from their mobile devices for quick issue resolution.
All of these new use cases are imposing additional burdens on IT support, but those of you tasked with support are most likely not seeing increases in your annual IT budgets. To survive and indeed thrive, it’s imperative for you to rethink your support solutions. What tools and strategies can give you and your team an edge in this rough and tumble mobile world?
Rethinking Solutions
Reevaluate your support channels – Enable your customers and employees to choose what channel is best for their needs. Do they want to ask for help from their mobile device or a social channel or do they want self-service via a knowledge-base portal?
Seek out integrated solutions– Look to cloud-based (SaaS) tools to combine key support functions in one easy interface. Tools like GoToAssist combine remote support with service desk/ticketing and IT monitoring for ease of use, efficiency and enhanced IT visibility and management. Imagine starting your remote support session with one-click from a service desk ticket; support agents no longer need to juggle separate tools.
Select tools that can support mobile devices – Today your tech support agents probably deliver assistance mainly to PC and Mac users. Make sure your new tools have the capability to support mobile devices. Ideally, the processes for supporting mobile devices will track how your team delivers support to PCs and Macs. This would enable greater service consistency and less training.
Consider policies for BYOD and additional security – What happens when an employee loses their mobile device and important company data is on that device? Do you have an MDM (mobile device management) tool to automatically wipe the device’s data? What if the device belongs to the employee in a BYOD environment and you just deleted their favorite photos of their vacation or their child? Remember to set security policies that clearly address this.
Look at tools with open platforms – Select tech tools that offer free APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), so you can smoothly integrate your new tools with existing infrastructure, applications and third-party systems.
Remember that “great support is a competitive advantage” – Your support tools can define your level of service excellence. It’s important you consider solutions that are simple to set up, easy to use for both support agents and customers, and drive adoption (with not too much training ‒ who has extra time for that?).
These are some of the strategies guiding tech teams as they navigate the complexities of delivering support in the mobile 21st century. One solution – Citrix GoToAssist – helped pioneer tech support and continues to nimbly innovate to help IT teams surmount ever new support challenges. Whether it’s fast anywhere remote support, assistance to mobile devices, multi-channel strategies or integrating multiple tech tools in one easy platform ‒ GoToAssist is leading the way.
GoToAssist lets you deliver support to Android, iPhones, iPads and other browser-based mobile devices, just like you support PCs and Macs. With a GoToAssist solution, you’ll be able to take advantage of full screen sharing, remote control, chat and session recording for Samsung Android devices. For other Android devices, you’ll be able to deliver chat support, receive screen shots from users and upload files for issue resolution. For iOS devices, you’ll be able to receive screen shots from users that show the issue and then chat back to the user the defined issue resolution and you can also configure device settings and share profiles via chat. For all other browser-based mobile devices, you’ll be able to offer customer-initiated support and chat to communicate with the user about the issue and ultimately how to resolve it.
The GoToAssist integrated toolset solution combines remote support with service desk and monitoring, delivering easy access to key support functions from one interface. All products seamlessly work together for added support efficiencies and data sharing. Choose one, two or all three GoToAssist products to remove support complexities, drive efficiencies and reduce costs. Using all three together makes it simple for support professionals to identify, ticket and resolve issues.
Use Remote Support to deliver technical assistance to PC, Mac & mobile device users.
Use Service Desk to log & track incidents, end-user self-service and manage configurations.
Use Monitoring to proactively manage and inventory IT networks, servers, services.
Tech pros talk about the value of the GoToAssist integrated toolset
“GoToAssist allows us to handle one-third more customers with the same number of people.”
-Shawn Dirksen, Senior Applications/Software Engineer, Flir Systems, Inc.
“The integration of GoToAssist Remote Support and Service Desk provides the flexibility to open a ticket and then launch a support session, or the reverse – if I’m on a session and want to investigate further, I’ll open a ticket. When tools just work together, all in one easy interface, I’m getting more done – easier and faster.”
-Thomas Papantonis, President and Owner, Titan Electronics
“I came from the helpdesk world, have done a couple new implementations along the way and I’m ITIL certified. [GoToAssist Service Desk] is by far one of the best help desk products I have every come across.”
-Sr. Systems Administrator, IT Department, Chippewa Valley Technical College
“GoToAssist Service Desk has helped by removing all the noise and distractions that our previous toolset encouraged. We no longer worry about extending our use of the ITIL framework – we just get on and do it. Ease of use and simplicity are paramount.”
-Graeme Shellard, IT Operations Manager, Fronde
“GoToAssist Remote Support is a great money saver. For instance, I was working with a customer located three hours away. I used remote support to check on the status of an issue, which turned out to be an ISP problem. Without GoToAssist, I would have spent hours in the car for nothing and lost a great deal of productivity.”
–Thomas Papantonis, President and Owner, Titan Electronics
We encourage you to take a free test drive of GoToAssist for 30 days. You’ll see how powerful this combined tool can be for your organization. Want to learn more about our solutions? Visit us at www.GoToAssist.com.
Are you going to be at Citrix Synergy 2013 in Los Angeles on May 22-24? If so, we’d love for you to stop by our exhibit and see a GoToAssist demo. We will also be announcing something really big … a major game changer for support professionals. Stop by and see us!
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