#GoToGetsIT: This article is part of an ongoing series from GoTo’s thought leaders on the frontlines: Our Solutions Consultants deeply understand our customers’ unique challenges and connect the right solutions to meet their goals using GoTo technology. Here, they share their industry knowledge on what it takes to help businesses everywhere thrive in a remote or hybrid world.
Traditionally, remote support has always been thought of as a tool used by technicians to resolve problems with little to no end user interaction. But it can be leveraged as a teaching tool. Here’s how to help your employees self-service and reduce the number of basic troubleshooting tickets.
Remote support, before and after
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, IT support was typically provided in a variety of ways, depending on the needs of the business or organization. Some common methods of providing IT support included:
1. In-person support
This involved providing IT support to users by physically visiting their location and providing assistance on-site.
Pros: This was often the most effective method of providing support, as it allowed IT staff to directly interact with users and troubleshoot issues in real-time.
Cons: Longer resolution times and technicians can only support one user at a time.
2. Phone support
This involved providing IT support to users over the phone, typically through a call center or help desk.
Pros: Phone support allowed IT staff to provide assistance to users remotely
Cons: But it was often less effective than in-person support as it was more difficult to understand and resolve issues without being able to see the user’s device.
The good thing about both support methods is that it required the presence of an employee to participate throughout the entire IT assistance. This meant that the employee not only be present on the screen, but actively learn from the experience, which meant the employees would know the resolution to the simple issues rather than having to reach out the IT team for the mundane queries.
Then due to the pandemic, the use of remote support significantly increased as businesses and organizations had to adapt to remote work and minimize in-person interactions. Remote support tools allowed businesses to continue providing support to their customers and employees, even if they are located in different parts of the world.
While this did help IT organizations troubleshoot users from different corners of the world, the dramatic increase in remote support requests brought about a new challenge. IT was now more focused on resolving issues rather than teaching the end user how to solve their own issues in the future. This led to multiple tickets with the same kind of issues and a greater reliance on service desk teams to fix the issue, rather than end users learning how to solve basic problems.
Making sure the help desk team is actually helping
Moving forward, IT teams will need the right tools to get the most of everything remote support can offer. We've seen an increased use of easy-to-use cloud-based tools and platforms, such as GoTo Resolve. This tool allows support staff to remotely access a user’s device and provide assistance regardless of the user's location.
Another major change in remote support has been the development of more advanced and user-friendly tools for screen sharing and remote control. These tools allow support staff to see exactly what the user is seeing and provide guidance or troubleshooting steps in real-time.
How does GoTo Resolve help here? You do not necessarily need to just do the job while the end user waits. Instead, make it interactive – communicate with the user to guide them with their troubleshooting.
Teaching as a tool is especially helpful today because support staff is tasked with more than supporting more than the traditional laptop and desktop in remote workstations. IT is now required to provide troubleshooting for users who are facing issues with their hardware. So it is no longer just an app not working, but also for users who are facing issues anything between a printer not printing from their work device, all the way to helping them find the “any” key that needs to be pressed to continue. (Funny, but true!)
Visual Engagement for Remote Support
Now, with the help of GoTo Resolve’s camera share function, you no longer have to ask the user to ship out the device or travel to different locations for support. Instead, you can use the end user's mobile device as your eyes and ears, all without having to share personal details such as your mobile number. This not only reduces the effort you put in for hardware troubleshooting, but also helps your company reduce their carbon footprint by reducing onsite visits.
This level of remote troubleshooting means your end users don’t walk away while troubleshooting. This in turn can help enhance the self-sufficiency of employees by allowing them to resolve issues on their own, with the help of support staff as needed. Not only can employees become more confident and independent in their work, but it also improves the support agents’ overall productivity and job satisfaction.
Finally, one of the most important tools in the arsenal for a support agent is the ability to have a well-documented self-service guide. What better content to include than a video walkthrough of the same type of issue? With GoTo Resolve providing customers unlimited cloud recording, you can now use the sessions recorded by your technicians to be captured as a self-service guide to help your employees fix issues on their own and reach out when they hit a hurdle.
Self-service is a win-win
Implementing self-service options not only benefits end users by providing them with the resources they need to resolve issues on their own, but it can also improve the efficiency of the support team.
By enabling end users to self-serve, support staff can focus on more complex tasks and strategic initiatives, freeing up time for lower-level technicians to handle lower-level issues. To make this transition smooth, it is important to thoroughly document and test self-service solutions and provide ongoing training to tier 1 support reps to ensure they are equipped to handle more complex requests. By doing so, the support team can provide more efficient and cost-effective support.