Support by PC Remote Control Will Soon be Expected

First Posted February 23, 2006

Get on the bandwagon before your customers notice you don’t have it

In a recent article I read, increasing customer satisfaction was listed as the top reason for deploying new customer support and service tools. Competitive pressure was listed as the primary reason for such deployments by only about 12% of those surveyed.

This is really interesting to me, because in reality, competitive pressure is the underlying reason for almost all customer support purchasing. The fact that the reason for purchase is perceived as something else is irrelevant.

The reason for this is pretty simple: customer satisfaction is relative rather than absolute. As the market, the technology, and the support tools change, so too does the customer’s definition of what constitutes great customer support. If a company were to use the greatest support tools and practices from twenty years ago, they may have led the rankings in 1985 but they would get abysmal ratings today.

Some things never change. It has always been preferable to be able to access a human being without getting deflected like snow on a windshield by endless “press twenty-two to be forwarded to options level six”. It has always been preferable for that support rep to be courteous and knowledgeable.

A lot of things do change, though. Think of how poorly the systems of yesterday would handle the support volumes of today. Think of what it would be like to have to send a letter (made of paper, put in an envelope, requiring a “stamp”) to the support department rather than sending an email. Imagine how long it would take a big company to respond to your support email if they did not have a good system to track and route the email to the correct person.

The point is that as the technologies and support practices improve, so does the customer’s expectation for his or her level of support. “Satisfied” is relative to how satisfied the customer was with the last company they received support from. So in reality, competitive pressure drives the customer satisfaction treadmill. As the pace of the competition increases, customer satisfaction becomes more difficult to achieve.

This principle holds true for the remote support market as well (at least that’s our hope). Right now, our customers are using remote support as a competitive differentiator to set their services apart from the competition. The current customer response goes something like “You would not believe what happened when I called XYZ for support for my PC. The guy logged on and fixed my PC while I watched. He could even type on my keyboard”. The customer is thrilled that the problem was fixed faster than normal and that the process didn’t involve “click on…what are you seeing?” As the market begins to adopt remote support as the default standard for tech support, the customer’s response to being supported via remote control will change from exhilaration to expectation.

Try to remember the first time you paid for something using a credit or debit card vs. cash. Now think of the last time someone refused to accept your credit or debit card and whined at you that you needed to use cash. Convenience is great, but is only experienced as great for a short time before it becomes mandatory for your general well-being. Think electricity, washing machines, ATMs, online banking, email, anything that offers a clear efficiency improvement. Eventually efficiency improvements become sucked into the vacuum and become the new baseline, waiting for the next advance.

So the message, at least for the support crowd is clear: get on the remote support bandwagon before the response to your support services becomes “well I got support and he fixed my problem, but it took him forever because he couldn’t even take control of my computer and I couldn’t understand what he was trying to explain to me”. No other single practice has the same potential for increasing the efficiency of a tech support call as remote control. Customers and employees will soon begin to notice its absence more than its presence. This will mean a sharp downturn in the average customer support call length. The customer satisfaction ratings of companies that refuse to implement will take a sharp downturn as well.