Support Desk Economics 101 - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
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John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research, SSPA:
Hello and welcome to today's SSPA webcast, sponsored by Bomgar and RightAnswers. Our topic today is Support Desk economics 101 - Reduce, reuse and recycle. My name is John Ragsdale and I'm vice president of technology research for the SSPA. I'm joined on today's webcast by Nathan Etherton [PH], IT service desk manager for the University of Missouri. Brad Prizer, executive vice president of marketing for Bomgar. And Simon Yelsky, vice president of product management and client success for RightAnswers. Thank you all for joining me today.
Let's go ahead and get started. Over the last decade we have seen support organizations go through a lot of changes in order to cut cost and increase productivity. We've worked smarter, not harder. We've trained, we've consolidated, we've streamlined. We've created very highly affective and productive support organizations. But welcome to 2009 and economic recession and now we're being pushed to do even more with even less. Today we're going to talk about how we can leverage technology and leverage multiple technology components together to continue to drive down cost, increasing agent productivity and creating a better experience for customers overall. So if you've been a part of our ongoing SSPA webcast series, we've touched on lots of different technology components and how they can impact the customer experience and the bottom line. Today we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to talk about multiple technology areas and how using them together can even help you streamline further in your organization. So we know that one way to definitely get more return on investment from a technology investment is increasing employee adoption and making sure that employees are trained to use the tools that you're monitoring, how they use them, and encouraging them all the time. But also we need to make it just easier for the employees to use the applications correct. One of the ways we do that is by integrating the application data and the processes to streamline problem resolution.
So let me give you some real world examples about this. We survey all of our SSPA member companies and a lot of different -- hundreds of operational and financial metrics. One of the questions we ask them is which tools or which sources do you find the most useful in solving customer problems? I have the results here for the top four most useful resources. The number one is the knowledge base, no surprise. Number two is system log files. So being able to look at actual error messages or log files in a remote computer system. Next is remote control, remote support technology and the fourth most common resource is case or incident record. Today we're talking about how all four of these can be combined to improve service levels and also have a big impact on your cost structure. Now last year I published a report about how it's getting a little more complex to buy new technology today. Because we're seeing blurring boundaries. There are so many different areas of support technology, we're seeing a lot of partnerships, we're seeing some acquisitions and mergers. I kind of put knowledge base in the center because everything touches that knowledge base. Today we're going to talk about how remote support, you see that circle over to the right, is coming together with the knowledge base and how combining those two can really improve things both for customers and for support cost. So lets talk to a real world example about how these different entities work together and how integration can help.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research, SSPA:
So I'm looking here at a typical incident flow. We're starting with entitlement, verifying who the customer is. Creating the ticket, searching the knowledge base, in this case, we're initiating the remote support session to touch that remote computer. Perform a few diagnostics, check some values. Ultimately we resolve the issue. Once the issue is resolved we document what we did on the ticket and then we closed that incident out. So this is a very standard process that we see hundreds or thousands of times a day and support this around the world.
Now lets look at how we can improve this process by integration. So the first opportunity of course is a screen pop so that you have a telephony integration. You immediately know who that customer is, which makes it a lot faster to get through that entitlement stuff. Another integration point we see Now lets look at how we can improve this process by integration. So the first opportunity of course is a screen pop so that you have a telephony integration. You immediately know who that customer is, which makes it a lot faster to get through that entitlement stuff. Another integration point we see a lot of companies doing is automatically initiating a knowledge based search based on that incident information you just gathered and typed into your ticket. So that saves you having to cut and paste into a separate tool to do a search of the knowledge base. The next step is if a remote control session is the right thing to do for a problem, you need to prompt people within that knowledge base article to go ahead and fire up that remote control session. I have some member companies actually put a button in the knowledge base article so the agent can press that button and automatically start that remote session.
So again what we're trying to do here is make it really simple and obvious for the technical support agents to utilize all the different pieces of technology. At the next step, once all of the work has been complete, we need to take all of the information about what happened in that remote control session, all the system log files that we know were so critical and move those automatically into the incident. As a former support manager I know that trying to get tech to document everything they did in that support incident is a constantly loosing battle. So if we can automatically pass that audit trail up from the support session into the incident that it's going to make a big difference long term in your ability to do a different kind of root cause analysis and look at failure rates across the different systems.
Let me close down here before I turn things over to our panel of experts today with a few recommendations. So our theme again is reduce, recycle and reuse. From my perspective, we need to reduce the number of agent screenings; we know that in the financial services world there are up to 19 different applications that agents have to navigate on their desktop to service customers. In the tech support world or high tech it's 10 to 12 different applications or screens on the desktop. So if we can find ways to merge those applications, integrate those different process steps, making it easier for the agents you're going to really speed up these customer facing processes. I would also recommend that you select technology that offers pre-integration, so you don't have to create these run-off integration environments.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research, SSPA:
Next, recycle that captured session data and those log files. You tell us that the session data, the log files are critically important, so make sure that you're catching those in the incident, that you can report on those and do long term more diagnostics to help really improve things for your customers [unintelligible].
The final step is reuse; make sure you're reusing existing technology wherever possible. Remember what I said. You cannot get return on investment for technology purchase unless you can get employees to use the application. So train, recognize and reward to encourage adoption of all the cool innovative technology you are bringing in to your support center.
With that, I'm going to turn things over to our first guest speaker, Nathan Etherton from the University of Missouri. Nathan are you there?
Nathan Etherton, Service Desk Manager, University of Missouri:
I am John.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research, SSPA:
Take it away.
Nathan Etherton, Service Desk Manager, University of Missouri:
Alright, so as John mentioned, I'm with the University of Missouri. I'm the IT service desk manager. I've been in this role for probably a little over five years now. What I'm going to talk about today is how we're leveraging both knowledge management and remote assistance technologies to really improve the overall economics of our service desk. So from both a cost effectiveness standpoint, also from internal efficiencies that can be gained through additional capacity and other methods. First just a little about the university environment. We support both students and employees as our customer base. On the student side we have a little over 30,000 and this past year was our largest freshman class ever. So we had more students on campus than ever before. On the employee side about 17,000. What makes us a little more unique than some organizations is that we have a centralized, decentralized methodology for IT service and support. We're centralized IT infrastructure and services standpoint so the network, the email systems, the core systems and services - that's all centralized on campus. We're decentralized however at the desktop. The deploying new work stations, baseline software support within the departments, that's all handled at a decentralized level. So we have a variety of IT people scattered all over campus. We do have relationships with these people so there are some synergies there. But that's one of the ways that we're a little unique in that not everything comes to the centralized IT environment.
Nathan Etherton, Service Desk Manager, University of Missouri:
A little bit about the service desk itself, the team that I manage, this is in the centralized IT environment. So we maintain and support those core systems and services we use throughout the campus. We have 11 employees, these are full timers, three are part timers who are also student [unintelligible]. There are also extended hours so we're open till 10 o'clock at night during the week and also some hours on Saturdays and Sundays as well, but it's important to note that we're not a 24/7 shop. So that's one of the opportunities that I'll talk about here in a little bit on what we wanted to get through some additional technologies like knowledge management, is how we can provide more value through self service to cover that 24/7 type of environment.
A little bit about how much volume we handle. Last year we handled a little over 51,000 support tickets. These are actual support tickets that came to the service desk. So they do not include any self service numbers in them. As you can see, calls are definitely our top support channel. But that number has been decreasing over the last couple of years. Secondary is our walk in center that's still located in the book store, so it's a nice convenient location. We're actually seeing that number increase. I attribute that to the fact that more students are showing up on campus with laptops, handheld devices, they're already -- they have those devices with them. They're already on campus. They're in the book store or surrounding areas. It's just a convenience factor to be able to show up and get some one on one, face to face support. So we've actually been seeing those numbers increase.
Email and web, so things that we receive from email or web forms, that number's pretty low. That's by design. The number actually used to be a little bit higher, but we've tried to phase that out as we've brought on knowledge management and other self service to get them to use those technologies instead of this reactionary email web. I say reactionary because email typically results in back and forth emails that could extend the incident from being open for a matter of minutes to a matter of a few days or longer just because you don't have that live contact with the customer. So we've definitely pushed the live support channels being calls, walk-ins and we're going to be looking into the chat com support channel as another live communication channel here in the near future.
Some of the opportunities we're looking at, like I mentioned knowledge management and remote assistance. On the knowledge management side, our organization has scattered silos of knowledge everywhere. So, we had stuff on our public website that customers could see but again, it wasn't in a single place. It was scattered all over our website. We have SharePoint that we use for an internal portal of knowledge. We had content on file servers. We had content in our incident management system. People had content that they were storing in their own personal email in boxes. So we wanted to find a way to really pool that knowledge together to share it. Because keeping the knowledge to yourself like in your personal email account, we're not improving the overall IT operation.
Nathan Etherton, Service Desk Manager, University of Missouri:
I also mentioned earlier on the last slide that we wanted to add value through self service. So we wanted to provide a mechanism to have I also mentioned earlier on the last slide that we wanted to add value through self service. So we wanted to provide a mechanism to have some support 24/7 as the university just doesn't shut down at 10 o'clock at night when the service desk closes. We have different departments that have 24/7 operations. We wanted to provide a level of service to those as well as to the students who continued to study and use that system after hours. On the remote assistance side we definitely wanted to avoid the shortcomings of our previous tool. We're not new to remote assistance. We had a solution for several years but we just didn't use it. We didn't use it for a few different reasons. First and foremost it just wasn't easy to use. There were a number of clicks involved to initiate a session from the analyst's perspective followed by a number of clicks on the customer's side to complete the establishment of the connection between the analyst and the customer. The overall elapsed time just was too long for our analysts that tended to go with the questions back and forth instead of going through all the time and effort involved in establishing that remote assistance connection. We definitely wanted to avoid that.
We also wanted a solution that was cross-platform. Our solution only worked on Windows machines and in the university environment we're seeing a huge growth in the Macintosh population. So Windows and Mac supports big. We have some Linux support devices out there. Across platform support was a big issue for us as well. Then the other bullet there under remote assistance we wanted to look at chat as a new support channel. So I mentioned the live support, the calls and walk-ins today. So another way that we can kind of try to phase out the email side is people who want to have electronic communications with us, can try to leverage chat to do that.
Up there at the top in that cloud, these are things that are just kind of part of the continuous process improvement so how can we always look at cost affective solutions. What are some ways we can improve our KPI's? First contact resolution, time to resolution, things of that nature and then our internal efficiency, how long does it take us to train our staff and get them up to speed? So that's kind of an umbrella of things that cover any and all solutions that we look at.ink John mentioned earlier, the adoption. It's fine to have a technology but if people don't use it, you're not improving things. So since our old solution wasn't being used, we engaged our support analyst in the decision to make a process to make sure they were comfortable with the solution and that it would meet their needs.
On the remote assistance side why did we pick Bomgar? So the cross-platform capabilities, they have it - all within one tool, one interface, one desktop client that we use. It works. For the Windows, Mac's, Linux. They can provide support for handheld devices. The quick and easy to use. I mentioned this is a big issue. With our old tool it wasn't quick and easy to use. So when we were looking at new solutions we kind of laid them out and we really benchmarked how many clicks it took and how much time did it take to establish those connections and we did that across different internet speeds. So we did it across the dial up, which was actually pretty good and easy to connect across the dial up and still have some uses on that. Then we also tested over DSL's and LAN's. So, quick and easy to use was definitely a big part. I think John mentioned earlier, the adoption. It's fine to have a technology but if people don't use it, you're not improving things. So since our old solution wasn't being used, we engaged our support analyst in the decision to make a process to make sure they were comfortable with the solution and that it would meet their needs.
Don also mentioned in his earlier slides integration. So in our environment we use the MC Remedy [PH] as our IT service management solution. We also use Afton [PH] Directory as our directory services. So we wanted to be able to integrate to both of those systems to streamline the overall process. Which then kind of leads back up into the quick and easy to use. If it's already kind of linked together with those processes or it uses the same user names and passwords, it'll be a lot easier for the analyst to use.
Nathan Etherton, Service Desk Manager, University of Missouri:
Current user licensing model. This kind of ties back to the skill building one, the last bullet also. By having a current user licensing model, not only is it more cost affective because you're able to have multiple people share a pool of licenses, it just provides that scalability and flexibility as far as in our environment if we wanted to kind of roll this out to our decentralized IT people. We would be easily able to do that without having to buy a fixed user license for each and every user. So think beyond the service desk here. You could leverage remote assistance throughout your organization through processes, into your one, two and three and your two group, definitely uses it to avoid the speaker methodology. To where they're running around campus [unintelligible]. They're able to leverage it as well. So think beyond the service desk.
On the RightAnswers side, again we're looking for scalability. With RightAnswers and knowledge management we're actually looking for a solution that we could scale across our system of campuses. We have a campus in St. Louis, Kansas City, Rala [PH] and here in Columbia. So we wanted a solution that we could scale across those campuses that would enable those campuses to create and maintain their own content appropriate for their IT environments but also to where we could share content between portals. That we could create things once instead of four times.
Integration was another big point. Again, we wanted to integrate with active directory and remedy. RightAnswers offered a substantial library of canned content. So I think they cover a couple of hundred different software titles and enterprise applications that they create - prepare content for. This enabled us to focus more on internal content, things that are custom to our environment. We didn't have to spin our wheels documenting how to do things in Microsoft Word or other canned software solutions.
The final bullet there is [unintelligible] KCS verified. We had went through some KCS training. For those of you who are not familiar with that, that's Knowledge Centered Support. It's basically a methodology for a good practice of capturing and reusing knowledge and just the continuous improvement of that knowledge management process. So since RightAnswers is KCS verified, a lot of those best practices are tied directly into solution, so we're able to leverage those in our initiatives.
Tying this back to the economics, on the reduce side; we are reducing those silos of knowledge I talked about earlier. Where we haven't completely reduced them, they're still out there. But we're definitely starting to pull them together. So especially on the customer facing side, any and all customer facing content is finding its way into our knowledge base, it's self service knowledge base. We're also making progress on even internal facing content that should be shared between like the service desk and making tier 2 and 3 units. So we're definitely making progress in that area.
Nathan Etherton, Service Desk Manager, University of Missouri:
I think common issues is huge in our environment. I put down there especially during our peak back to school times. In our environment, higher education, we experience about 20% turnover in our customer base each and every year. So this is caused by the graduating class leaving and an incoming class coming in. So around the August to September time frame is our peak. Probably 25% of our overall volume for the year during those two months and actually it's probably a matter of two or three weeks -- expand those two months. So the ability to deflect common issues during that time is critical. Historically those months would result in a lot of abandoned calls in our call center - a long average speed of answer. By deflecting common issues we're able to reduce our abandons, we're able to get to customers more quickly and we're able to handle more customers. When I say handle more customers I'm talking about [unintelligible]. So people are helping themselves, where they would have had to call us. So we're helping more people by enabling self service technology.
Using escalations, before we had these solutions in place our escalation percentage was a little over 28%. We're down to a little over 21% now. So that's happened in the course of about two years. This is attributed to both solutions. So, on the knowledge management side our analysts definitely have more knowledge at their fingertips. So they're able to resolve more issues by querying the knowledge base. But also on the remote assistance side we're able to see what the customer sees. So things before where maybe we'd be scratching our head because we're just not getting it - there is something not clicking between what the customer is telling us and what we're interpreting- now we're able to see that work station, to walk the customer through different things so we're able to resolve more issues through that technology as well.
The final bullet there, reducing the time to train new agents. We went from about taking a little over three weeks to get an agent up and running to where they're on the phones by themselves, to about a week. So again, this is by leveraging both of those technologies. They have the knowledge at their fingertips through the knowledge base and for new agents that maybe aren't sure of themselves and don't know what types of questions to be asking through the process, now they can see. They can remote into someone's computer and they can see what the customer's talking about which helps them from stumbling around and not knowing what type of questions to ask. So on the last two, we definitely see some big cost savings on reducing escalations, which mean cost savings from the standpoint of [unintelligible] tier one which is a lower cost per contact. We're seeing cost savings and then reducing time to train the agents. Get people up to speed to where they're adding value to the operation more quickly. We're seeing cost savings there as well.
On the reuse side, of course we're using our support session data so things that we're used to tracking in our IT service management solution and also data that's collected through their remote assistance process we're able to capture and reuse that data to contribute content into the knowledge base. As far as reusing the knowledge base we have it tied directly into the system that the agents are already using. So they're already typing in the customer information and logging issues. From Remi [PH] they're immediately able to query the knowledge base so it's tied right into their existing process.
Nathan Etherton, Service Desk Manager, University of Missouri:
Then on the customer side, the self service side of the knowledge base, you can see our numbers from 2007 to 2008. We've been live for two years. We've had over 100% growth in that -- from 2007 to 2008 period. So I'd expect continued growth as we continue to introduce self service to the incoming freshman classes and get all of our end users kind of familiar with this method.
On the remote assistant side, I mentioned earlier, that our analysts just didn't use the old solution. They do use the new solution. They had -- this met their needs. It was quick and easy to use and they had involvement in the process. So we're seeing a lot of [unintelligible] there at the analyst's side. The customers - they ask for it. So if they had a good experience to where we remote assisted them at one time, they'll call back and we'll try to do some baseline questions. They'll get to a point where we'll be like, "Hey, can you just Bomgar me?" because they had a pleasant experience with it last time. So there's reuse on the knowledge base and the remote assistance side from both avenues. From both the internal perspective and the customer side.
On the recycling efforts, the first one kind of a duplicate point from the previous five but we're recycling our support session data and we're turning that data into knowledge that can be reused. The biggest area that we're able to recycle however is staff capacity. So by deflecting calls and deflecting issues through self service channels we're increasing our capacity at the service desk, which enables us to add more value to the university. So we're adding more value by maybe support systems that we haven't supported before or supporting systems in more depth than we used to. We're adding value through that. We're also freeing up time and capacity to spend more time on root cause analysis instead of just applying this quick fix. We have more time to really look into the problem to see if we can resolve it for future times that may not come up.
We're also able to spend time on projects. So historically there would be a project going on and then right when the project finished up they'll be like hey, service desk, we're going live on Monday and it kind of catches us off guard. Well now we're able to spend more time in those project meetings getting up to speed and getting prepared so when the flood gates open up, roll out a new service or when we make a big technology change, we're better prepared for that.
Then also on the training and development side - more time. We have more time during our idle times to spend on training, job shadowing and other efforts.
Nathan Etherton, Service Desk Manager, University of Missouri:
So what's next for us? So that's a little bit about where we've been, what's next? I mentioned earlier, we want to pilot inbound chat with remote assistance. Okay the live back and forth is really [unintelligible] so students and other audiences are starting to embrace the whole chat text messaging stuff. We want to really leverage that in our environment and see how we can streamline that through our processes. We're going to try that over the summer and we're going to do that in our computer labs on campus. They're not going to be staffed. So if someone needs help in the computer lab there will be a little button. I think it's called a Bomgar button on their desktop that they can click and immediately initiate a chat session with one of our analysts who can then remote assistant if necessary.
We also want to further integrate the Bomgar remote assistant solution with Remedy. Just really completely streamline that process to make sure that data that's collected from the remote assistant session is being tracked in the Remedy system that then can be [unintelligible] back into the knowledge base.
On the RightAnswer side, RightAnswer just released a version 5 that offers a lot of new features and functionality. A lot of which are tied to the KCS initiative. So we want to really start to leverage those and upgrade over the -- sometime later this spring. Then there's a new product from RightAnswers called Support Wiki that ties to our existing RightAnswers implementation. We're looking at this as the way to further drive adoption. But I'm not going to say it was easy to get tier 2 and 3 groups to contribute structured content into the knowledge base. But I'm hoping that through a Support Wiki, which our tier 2 and 3 groups do use, they use Wiki for tracking their -- and communicating within their own teams, that we'll be able to start to gather more knowledge from those teams that can be reused at the service desk level or other groups.
There is also the potential for us to expand the Wiki out to an end user level where there's power users on certain software titles or different technologies that they would like to contribute. So maybe this would work and enable us to drive adoption on the end user side as well. Then we want to continue to promote self service. As I mentioned, the 20% turnover every year. That's a big hit for us. So we've got to continue to promote the self service channel as a way to [unintelligible] each and every year.
With that, I will turn it over to Simon Yelsky with RightAnswers.
Simon Yelsky, Vice President of Product Management and Client Success, RightAnswers:
Thank you Nathan and thank you John and let me take you folks through a little bit of a background on RightAnswers and give you a sense of what role we think we could play around this reuse, reduce and recycle message. As a company, we're really unique in that we really started out as a knowledge practitioner if you will. So we're the folks that used to [unintelligible] knowledge and provide that knowledge, other tools, other service desk applications or knowledge management applications. For a while we were sort of observers of this market and while we're strong believers in knowledge, we know that there were some issues in the way people managed knowledge, in the way they could reuse it and in the way the users were able to look and find this knowledge. We came out with our own [unintelligible] of products to help address these issues.
So we started off providing our content, providing the portals that are integrated to the service desk and that are enabled for end users as well as analysts. Over time, we've also expanded this to really get into the [unintelligible] message which is to say that knowledge is not just structured knowledge; it's really knowledge that's out in the new environment. It's unstructured knowledge and we've come up with products such as Support Wiki and RightAnswers knowledge explorer to get out to all this content that can then be used within your organization. As a product we're integrated to every major service desk application. Out of the box deployment whether it's BMC or CA or HP or many, many others. Our product is used across a number of leading outsourcers. Folks who really care about the cost model, about driving down the cost of support through affective use of knowledge and many of them use our products in that capacity.
Our product is deployed across 200 plus clients. This is all internal support. So these are all employees out there in the world using our product to get answers to their questions. And we think in many ways, we have as many internal facing self service knowledge base deployments as any other company in the world. So we really pride ourselves on that. In terms of our clients, our clients range in terms of size, industry, because at the end of the day, knowledge and self service is consistent and it's the same really no matter who you are and which company you are in. In that the problems have to be similar and the way you want to look for them tends to be very similar. So we do support a number of various segments and various types of clients.
We have been recognized as providers of knowledge management and self service. Sort of implies that we're not only [unintelligible] we're also providing you with the best technologies and approaches to this particular issue around knowledge effectiveness. As Nathan mentioned, our product does support a number of knowledge based methodologies including KCS. We also work very closely with idle processes and enabling idle processes and in many cases we really make your idle go better in that really help out in incident management and problem management and change management.
Simon Yelsky, Vice President of Product Management and Client Success, RightAnswers:
A little visual on our product set. Our product essentially is used by users of portal. So whether you're a support analyst who's coming in through an incidence form and then clicks on search knowledge and brings them into this portal environment or whether you're an end user who is coming in through an intranet somewhere in your company or your university and gets to this environment, you're viewing our content through a portal where all of the content is available to you and those portals are also providing a seamless channel for ticketing and ticket status. So it becomes a single stop shopping for self service for most employees and students and faculty for our clients. That's how they perceive this. This is sort of their RightAnswers spot for all of their particular issues.
Now in terms of sort of economics 101 and where we think we make the difference. One of the areas that we're really focused on is process efficiency. There are a couple of things that go into this process efficiency. One is the idea of trying to do a "one to many" support in terms of providing one article that can support all users at the same time. So during a peak time when you have a problem and you have an outage and everyone wants to call the help desk instead of calling the help desk they can go to the self service spot. They can read a known error or an FAQ announcement and immediately know what's going on. This "one to many" is a powerful message.
Now one of the other things that we focus on is really the end users. That we often, from the IT perspective, really focus internally and don't realize that the majority of the users are the end user. Think about what they do, what they need and how you can build a better environment for them. So we want to think from the end user in, instead of the IT out. Also with that, what really counts is the fact that we recognize that knowledge based deployment and knowledge based initiatives are not a product, it's an evolution. It's a road that you're getting on and we understand that you're going to fall behind a little. You're going to have changes in your personnel. We as a company kind of play the role of your partner and we work with you around content creation and training and so on. So we really don't allow for [unintelligible] kind of knowledge based initiative. When it comes to knowledge efficiency, this is also critical. That one of the challenges all of you know about is really not the first time that you create the content necessarily but how do you maintain it?
We as a company provide a lot of the content off the shelf or canned as Nathan said. But we update that continuously, so you're always getting great content for desktop support, for your devices, for any kind of sort of end user software if you will. But at the same time, we update that content continuously. We insure that everything looks consistent. They don't have to redesign new templates; you don't have to rack your brain in terms of how to make it look good. It's all provided and we as a company help you with making it better and making it simpler.
We're also focused on resource efficiency and we recognize that not all of you might have the skills necessary to make this the best self service knowledge based environment. So some of you may need management skills, some of you might need knowledge engineering skills. Some of you might need Wiki skills. We as a company sort of supplement that if you will with what we do and it's really baked into the process and the product. So at the end of the day, we understand that we need to provide resources and capabilities to help you manage during this time of tight resources and increasing demands from the end users.
Simon Yelsky, Vice President of Product Management and Client Success, RightAnswers:
Finally on the technology efficiency, we also know that these products need to be absolutely simple to drop in and implement and it's configured out of the box. It's really designed to be a plug and play product that talks to your authentication and active directory and your help desk. As I said earlier, we do bake a lot of stuff into the product. So the product will tell you what content is missing and what you might need to do in terms of improving your reduction rate or building the right content. Before I turn it over let me just say that we're working very closely with Bomgar and University of Missouri and other customers where RightAnswer serves as the front end for self service. That enables, through the remote control and chat to a much larger user audience. At the back end, we're also working to integrate the knowledge so all of the session information and chat information and remote sort of control information can be provided back to the end users. So with that, let me turn it over to Brad.
Brad Prizer, Executive Vice President of Marketing, Bomgar:
Thanks Simon and thanks for that really great overview of the RightAnswer solution and hello every one. My name is Brad Prizer. I'm the EVP of marketing here at Bomgar. At Bomgar we've seen [unintelligible] most service organizations. As a leading provider of enterprise remote support, we think the right solution is really simple as depicted by the acronym on this slide. By this we mean that your remote support solution should have the attributes of allowing remote session to be completely secure. Fully integrated with leading service desk solutions, speaking to the integration piece. Fully configurable for work flows and providing provision for reporting and monitoring as indicated by the manageability piece. Supports multiple operating systems. Provides quick return on investment by improving the productivity which really does lead to lower cost and have a full suite of features and functionality which we [unintelligible]. Most of these really were discussed by Nathan when he gave his overview of what they're doing at the University of Missouri. If you remember he spoke of their BMC Remedy integration. How it was quick and easy to use which speaks to the manageability piece. How it provided multiplatform support. They use a concurrent license model [unintelligible] ability with [unintelligible]. While all these are important benefits of Bomgar's remote support solution, today's webinar is really focusing on the topic and presentations of leading us into dive into enterprise focus a part of the simple philosophy we have here at Bomgar.
So let me explain that a bit further. This slide depicts the support landscape and environment that we normally deal with. As with most organizations, most support teams are using a multitude of solutions to support employees and sometimes outside customers. The systems usually begin with the systems management tools that help the team manage systems as the name implies. The systems may have a Legacy remote access solution built in. But it may not have the proper security measures for the enterprise. In addition the support group typically uses some sort of service desk management solution or ticketing system. These systems allow the support group to open and close incidents or tickets. They do a great job of tracking incidents and metrics while storing and maintaining the data the reps key into the system.
All of these systems utilize some sort of knowledge base or self help solution to help further drive efficiencies in the service desk as presented by our partners there at RightAnswers. But all these systems resolve issues quicker at the support desk. They don't allow you to see what's happening on the screen. With Bomgar we provide you that capability for a solution that allows your support reps to access any system on any network and literally anywhere. This leads to a reduced number of calls and a reduced call escalation. In addition the Bomgar solution automatically reports all the data within a support session. So not only does this help from a security standpoint where you no longer have to rely on teams typing in session data but in addition the automatic recording of support sessions allows you to utilize the session data to do a couple of things. Namely reuse the session data in the knowledge base as well as recycle session data for training.
Brad Prizer, Executive Vice President of Marketing, Bomgar:
We all know in today's economic climate that support organizations need solutions to help face issues such as shrinking IT budgets that we're all facing. Attracting and retaining employees and the mounting IT pressures related to mobile work forces and other dispirit technologies that we have to deal with.
Now with the Bomgar solution we're able to assist support organizations to reduce, reuse and recycle. That's the theme, so that they can do more without -- not with less, but do more with what they already have.
To sum up, let me give you a quick overview of Bomgar. A few things about Bomgar. We have over 4,500 clients. We focus 100% of our time, energy and resources on developing the most advanced remote support solution. We're one of the 10 fastest growing software companies in America. As indicated by INC. magazine. Unlike many other vendors on the market today who have taken existing technology such as collaboration software or remote access capabilities and tried to retrofit remote support functionality. Bomgar was literally [unintelligible] service and support profession.
So, we'd like to thank everyone and all of our co-presenters today and especially our customer Nathan Etherton with the University of Missouri for presenting real world examples of today's topic. And please don't forget to visit our website at www.bomgar.com to learn more about our company and our enterprise remote support solutions that are literally designed for all types of enterprise organizations. Thanks so much for your time and attention today and at this point I'd like to turn it back over to you John.
John Ragsdale, VP of Technology Research, SSPA:
Thank you Brad. This has been a really useful webcast for me. I know that this is going to be a very challenging year for all service and support organizations and if we can continue to share our expertise and these wonderful case studies of success I think we're all going to make it through this recession just fine.
So I'd like to thank my panelists, Nathan Etherton, Brad Prizer and Simon Yelsky for joining me today. Thanks to all of you for tuning in. This has been John Ragsdale for the SSPA. I look forward to seeing all of you at our next SSPA webcast. Have a great day and goodbye.