Reducing Costs and Improving Service with Remote Support
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April 3, 2008Download mp3 | Read Transcript
Raleigh Gould, Moderator:
Welcome, and thank you for joining us today for "Reducing Customer Support Costs and Improving Service Quality With Remote Support." My name is Raleigh Gould, and I will be your moderator for this event. Our featured speakers are Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director at Enterprise Management Associates; Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager at Pomeroy IT Solutions; and Chris Watson, VP of Strategic Alliances at Bomgar.
Lisa has more than 20 years of experience working in all aspects of IT, including network administration, software development, product management and strategic partnership development. Her current focus at EMA is SLM, BSM, the service desk, the service catalogue, and management systems for the SMB/SME environment. Clay has 10 years of IT experience in his current role as Global Service Desk Operations Manager, supporting several support desks across industrial service and financial services industries. Clay is an HDI certified professional Help Desk manager. And finally, Chris Watson has more than 15 years of experience in leading global marketing strategies for rapidly growing software companies. At Bomgar, Chris is responsible for the organization's indirect sales channel.
Prior to joining Bomgar, Chris was VP of Global Marketing and Investor Relations at S1 Corporation. Prior to S1, Chris served in various marketing and business development roles in several multi-million dollar software companies. While today's speakers will defer answering questions until the Q&A session following today's presentation, I encourage you to log your questions using the Q&A panel. And our speakers will get to as many questions as possible at the conclusion of this event. And now, I'd like to go ahead and hand things over to today's first featured speaker, Lisa Erickson-Harris. Lisa?
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
Thank you so much. Good afternoon, and thank you very much for attending. We appreciate that you all are very busy, and we're very happy to have you here. Moving along to today's agenda, we are going to be talking about really three central themes, and those themes are, of course, the service desk, the role that remote control plays in the service desk, but particularly how remote control has a relationship between service quality delivery and the cost structure in the service desk.
So, if you look at it, the service desk staff is front and center. And one of the things that I should be adding to my bio, really, is that I've also been a service desk analyst in my career, and I understand what it means to have all the pressures from many different people wanting to rely on you to help solve their problems, but also to help maintain the level of customer and user support, either inside and outside of your organization. They're really in the middle of things.
There are call centers and there are technical support desks. And in either case, the service desk technician is there and serving as the face for the company, the face for the organization, and certainly the face of the IT shop. There are . . . now, when I as a service desk analyst, it was quite some time ago, back in the early '90s. The environment today is quite a bit different. And it used to be very much a help desk environment where you would be responsible for resolving issues, technology issues. Today, however, there are a lot more responsibilities and a lot more pressures.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
There's still the fact that you are the face for the organization. However, you're often in the middle of change management. You're in the middle of CMVB initiatives. You have a lot of touch points to a lot of different organizations within the enterprise, which we'll talk about on the next slide. And you're also involved in process deployment as a driver for the service desk, along with its challenges.
The second bullet, "Cost Control and Limited Staffing", that's one thing that I think hasn't changed a whole lot since I was a service desk analyst myself. Cost control has always been an issue. The service desk has been somewhat unappreciated in some organizations. And there's generally been a limited staff that's expected to accomplish a whole lot in a short window of time for the organization, all while maintaining a positive face for the enterprise.
So, the evolved service desk ... if you're looking at the slide, the bubbles in the center of the slide really reflect many different management technology disciplines, and surrounding those management technology disciplines is the service desk. So, simply the message that we're trying to get across here is what exactly is the evolved service desk? And it is essentially an organization that has to have a touch point with every technology silo that exists today and those that are going to come on the scene as we go forward in the future.
Outside of that domain, where the center bubbles are down at the bottom, are different types of technologies that have even tighter links or are often part of service desk technology or closely related solutions. So, things such as the service catalog, such as self-service technologies, such as security and building a model for the service desk are all very closely related. They're gathering information from all the different technology silos that are in the center at the top.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
And then, I've highlighted the two areas that can help the service desk analyst better do their job more quickly in green on . . . to the left as being remote control and knowledge management. Those are some technologies that are out there that can help the service desk analyst to be more efficient. And so, we're going to shift here to do a polling question. And what I'd like to do is to ask you how long your company has utilized remote support technologies. Is this something that's new to your organization or not?
If you would take a look at the poll and answer as to whether you have deployed remote control technology more than three years ago, in the past 12 to 24 months, whether you're planning to deploy remote technology, whether you do not specifically use remote support technology, or if you don't know. And once you've chosen the answer that best fits your organization, just press the "Submit" button at the bottom of the screen. And I'll give you a moment to respond to that question.
Okay. And let's see what kind of responses we got on this poll. So, it's very interesting to me, then, that most of you have deployed technology more than three years ago. That tells me the technology's very mature and your organizations are also very mature. You may have deployed one solution, maybe even replaced it with another solution. There's a fair number of you that deployed it more recently, 12 to . . . in the last 12 to 20 months, but nobody, absolutely nobody, that's planning to deploy. So, that's good. So, most of you are probably familiar with what you can do generally with remote control technology. I'll go back to the slides, and we'll continue here by making the connection.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
Let me just see if I can get this back to you. There we go. All right, making the connection between service level management and remote support. So, this slide is meant to show you some of the features and functions that are part of service level management, which is a completely different discipline and a discussion all of its own. So, what I don't want to do is to cover each and every one of these functions, but really just to say that service level management is about connecting the technology silos to the organization's need. It's about delivering a level of service quality across technology silos. That's the goal. It's to ... meant to service the customer, whether that customer be internal, external, or a combination of both.
And where it intersects with the service desk and with remote control technologies is down at the bottom with the end user experience management, because SLM is all about making sure that a customer gets a good quality of experience when they're interacting with your organization. And because the service desk, their primary job is to make sure the customers are happy and up and running, there's a pretty tight connection.
And many of you might say there has been for many years. There is a SLM component that looks at how quickly you resolve issues, but there's also an operational component for SLM that looks at services that are often outside of the service desk. And I am suggesting to you that there's a role for the service desk and remote control in that environment as well, which is becoming more and more important in IT shops today.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
So, what is that connection? It ... on this screen I'm just attempting to show you the high-level flow of how there is a connection between the service desk and remote support. So, I've added another acronym on this screen called Business Service Management. Business service management and service level management are very closely tied together. BSM, however, takes you up to a business services, and then SLM ultimately supports the business service by measuring technology service.
The service desk can get involved, and does get involved very much, by making sure that those service commitments are met. So, it's all about not breaching those service commitments, whether they're business services or technology services. And in order to avoid a breach, remote control can have a big role, in my view, in making sure things are resolved. You're always going to have issues in your environment that need to be addressed. That's why we have service desks to begin with. And remote control can help you resolve those issues to avoid any kind of service breach that might come up.
So, imagine this scenario. You've got a user sitting at their workstation. They're in a business-to-business environment, a B2B site. They're trying to place an order for their customers, and access to the B2B site fails. It goes down. So, in essence, the business service has failed. There's been some sort of a glitch in the system that's caused it not to be accessible.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
So, this sets off a chain reaction of events. And the net, really, of this slide is that a lot of time is spent resolving issues. And in this particular scenario, we're talking about a service breach that has already happened. So, we're already building up time to be notified about this. The individual that's at their work station is going to call whomever their contact is, if it's the service desk directly, or another contact who will then in turn call the service desk. There's going to be time spent identifying the problem, correcting the problem, and then validating that the correction was made.
Now, all of those things can happen really quickly, or in a longer timeframe, especially when you don't know what the issue was, especially when you find out about the problem after the fact. So, in order ... the problem you have to figure out is what caused the problem. And if you look at the slide, I really love this graphic because it shows the roots protruding, tripping over each other, getting entangled and entwined. And when you're trying to find out what caused a particular issue to occur, that's exactly what happens in your environment.
There are some tools that can help you figure out what a root cause ... you know, the root cause of a particular problem is. But, generally, the ... things are pretty intertwined and meshed together. And there can be a lot of factors. And what you're really trying to do is to find out what triggered the problem. And the main reasons why you're trying to do that is because your customer satisfaction level is at risk, and, therefore, your reputation as a company is at risk. Your credibility is at risk, that of the IT organization, potentially that of the organization. And ultimately, you want to divert the SLA breaches that may have occurred. You want to minimize them.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
So, how can you get the root cause quickly? As I said, there are some technologies that can help you get there. And three key technologies that can help you is to have other operational management technologies in place that have correlation and root cause tools. Generally, those systems help a lot but don't necessarily get to the exact problem, particularly when you're talking about a user sitting at a desktop having some issue that might be unique to them. You have knowledge management systems where you can search and narrow down resolution to issues that are ... help to be supportive of the situation. And then, you have remote control.
So, you're sitting there. You are the service desk analyst. What do you do? You need to get as close to the problem as possible. And what remote control will help you to do is to avoid a number of different things that can increase some of those times that we were talking about. It can help you to avoid time that's required to dispatch a technician. So, somebody doesn't have to pack up their bags, drive somewhere, walk across the campus of the organization that you work at and extend that time.
It can give you a connection to a desktop, and even other systems, depending upon which solution that you're using, so that you can see. As a service desk technician, you're listening to a user. Whether they're experienced or not, there's their communication, your communication, your styles, and you're trying to understand the situation. If you can't see it, there's often opportunity for communication to extend those times. And that's where remote control solutions can help you. They also create an auto-trail of activity. Some do. All of them don't. As I said, they eliminate the time-consuming communication, and having that picture of what's going on is worth a lot of time savings in this sort of environment.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
So, understanding your costs is also important. What you want to do is you want to use a solution to help you reduce your support costs, but at the same time improve quality. So, you want to continue to have quality be high so that you can continue to generate more business and generate more momentum in your organization. So, at the same time, you want to find ways to minimize the costs.
In a support environment, there are a lot of costs. I've listed some of them in the gray box here - labor, handling time, which we've talked about quite a bit, dispatch time, which we've talked about. Service breach, you know, that's an issue of credibility and reputation. But, it really boils down to cost, because there are often penalties involved with a service level agreement, particularly if you're talking about an outsource service arrangement where, if you fail to meet even a single service breach, if you breach it just once in a window of opportunity such as a month, you may be required to pay penalties, and that's real out-of-pocket expenses.
So, this ... none of the technologies offered to you by remote control will work unless you put a process around it. There's more than one way to skin a cat, so to speak. So, this is really meant to offer you some guidance. These are things that you would need to do to make this all work. Remote control is a tool, and you need to use it wisely, and you need to put it inside your process in a way that allows you to efficiently take advantage of the information that it will give to you.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
And so, some of the tips are to, first of all, link your SLAs and your contract provisions to the service desk. You're likely already doing that for repair time SLAs. But, on the operational side of things where you may not see issues until they become issues, setting thresholds and notification capabilities to let the service desk know before the SLA is breached. So, you don't want to find out after your limit has breached. You want to set it a little bit lower than that so that you'll have time to react. And it's only when you do that that you can actually avoid a service breach.
So, once you've done that, you can utilize, you know, existing management technology notification capabilities. They become your early warning system. So, if you set them low enough, you'll know about it soon enough. You won't be waiting for that individual sitting at their workstation to call you and let you know.
And then, proactively deploy the remote control technology. It's not helpful, really, to anyone if the remote control technology is only used intermittently. It has to be part of your normal routine. And the reason for that is so that the help desk analysts are used to using it so they don't have issues about how it works and what they can get out of it and what they can't. And at the same time, the people that you are supporting, no matter where they are inside or outside the organization, are accustomed to having you operate in that way so that you don't get any kind of roadblocks at the time when there could be a big, big problem.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
And then, establishing your workflow so that you can take advantage of that remote support technology. Where in the process are you going to use it? Are you going to use it right off the bat? Are you only going to use it with desktop situations? It could be different for any organization. But, decide in advance. Don't leave that up necessarily to the service desk technician entirely. I mean, they need some room to move in making decisions. But, some guidance is helpful.
And then lastly, provide feedback to executives. And here, I mean business and IT executives. If you have this process in place and it's working well, you want to make sure that they know about it and they know about why it's working so that they would continue to be supportive of the tool, and so that they understand it's a tool that you need to be effective. And I'm going to close with two slides about customer environments. These are quotes from customers that have experienced some real success using remote control. The first slide is about controlling costs as they relate to labor.
So, I'll read a couple of these quotes to you. So, for instance, lost time. "We've taken ownership of the centralized office. Before, our guy would have had to go a whole day to go up there and take care of business. Now he can do it without leaving his desk." Okay, so that's ... you've now regained some time to work on other things. And when you think about "go up there," it really depends on your geography as a company. But, that might be two hours to get to a location, two hours to fix an issue, and then two hours to come back when you might have used remote control to solve that problem in one to two hours, and then you've regained some of the time. That translates to labor costs.
Lisa Erickson-Harris, Research Director, Enterprise Management Associates:
Also, employee retention. If you burn people out driving around or having to do more travel than necessary, then you end up having increased training costs associated with those individuals. And then lastly, of course, reduction in mean time to repair. And then, the last slide that I have for you today, "Controlling Costs and Customer Environments Related to Service", these items, in my view, are equally, if not more important. It's about customer satisfaction. So, it ... this particular organization was able to increase support capacity to increase their profitability. That's one thing. But, at the same time, they were able to achieve the reduced travel. We were talking about the better customer service.
And if you look at the bottom line results here, we're talking about real expense dollars. This particular organization was sending a technician onsite four times - when they did presales, when they did sales, when they did implementation, and when they did training. And each trip was about $2,000 in expense each. So, what they stated was that, last week alone, we did 14 V-trips, or virtual trips. They did their trips remotely, saving $28,000 and impressing new customers with their abilities.
So, as you can see, some of these trips really add up. Even if you're doing small trips, if you're doing a lot of them, the expenses related with those trips really do add up. They add up in customer perception, and they also add up in real dollars that are a cost to your IT organization that really could be better spent. And with that, I will pass the presentation over to Chris Watson. Chris?
Raleigh Gould, Moderator:
Actually, I think we'll turn that over to Clay for ... Pomeroy to talk a little bit about how he is using the Bomgar solution. So, Clay?
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
Excellent. Thank you, Chris. Good afternoon, everyone. This is Clay Guinn with Pomeroy IT Solutions. I am the Global Service Desk Senior Operations Manager. We are an IT outsourcing and professional services provider. We provide everything from Help Desk to depot support to consulting services, desk-side support, distributed services, things of those nature, really a one-stop shop should the customer choose to use us as the provider for all those services.
What I'm here to talk about today is the results that we were able to produce with a pilot with Bomgar in our environment. And that environment scales across the industrial sector, the financial sector, as well as the services sector. And what I'm going to talk with you about today is really the operational results that come from using Bomgar in the environment.
Here at Pomeroy we have a mantra, "Right way equals right results." And the challenge in that is is that you have to find the right way for your customers, for your employees, as well as the right tool set to go into your toolbox in order to make those things happen. And as the previous speaker mentioned, in your support base you have quality of service as your base, and then also you have speed of service. Speed of service can never exceed your quality of service. And Bomgar proved to help us maintain a quality of service while then increasing our speed of service, which then goes back to customer satisfaction and things like total time to resolution reductions.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
We also focus on cost take-out with value. We need to increase cost efficiencies. We need to decrease those costs. But then, we've also got to maximize our customers' IT investments because, in custom solutions, service levels provided obviously have to be funded. And the idea is to bring that total quality solution to the customer. And as we move forward in the presentation I'm also going to be talking about some of those numbers that were then proven in the pilot.
In this particular environment, we have 20 plus customers in a centralized support environment. And as mentioned before, we provide the support desk, which is also the barometer to the business. We generally handle 60,000 to 70,000 calls a month. Those are level one/level two calls, as well as some level three support and certain custom solutions. We do have very intense level one usage. And at the level one ... first level resolution phase, then that is where you can have some cost prevention strategies as well because, the more that you can close at the desk, the more efficient and more cost effective that you are.
In this particular pilot, we found that we could increase first-call resolution by 15 percent. We could also reduce the mean time to resolution on our top 10 resolvable calls. As we were reducing that time to resolution, we also found that we had an increase in customer satisfaction. We were able to get our experience through our subject matter experts, our second-level techs on those particular desks involved in the resolution. We were able to do that without a transfer of the telephone call, because, with Bomgar, you can have multiple sessions where you can engage multiple technicians. So, you can then bring them in to the solution phase without having to transfer the customer over to someone else, place them on hold, and things of that nature that would then prolong the resolution.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
Also, with Bomgar we were able to take our intellectual capital, if you will, the ... what I would refer to as your highest cost labor or your most experienced labor, and you were able to distribute their knowledge across more level-one calls. And were able to do this, again, with a multiple session. So, then the level-one analyst could then engage the necessary SME or the level-two and, in some cases, the level-three technician to bring about that resolution in a more time-efficient manner without having to actually log and escalate the ticket to a queue and then wait on a customer callback. It became more of a real-time solution scenario.
And with this particular tool, we had found that standardization across clients with different images with different support requirements became very, very practical when referencing the fact that, prior to this tool, we had custom solutions in these customer environments. We had tools that were VNC, DameWare, as well as a host of others that we were using in a customer environment, which, through non-standardization, we were using those tools in different ways at different times with ... really, at times, limited effectiveness. And at times, it didn't necessarily even bring about the necessary customer satisfaction requirements that we had with those particular customers.
So, Bomgar really allowed us to standardize the toolset and then bring all the positives, while eliminating the negatives, to each and every one of our customers across the global service desk. Also, as the previous speaker mentioned, it's very important to be able to meet your service level agreements. But, then you also have to be able to meet your customer satisfaction requirements, because it goes back to the customer, and they have to be satisfied. And what can occur is is that, in order to reach that customer satisfaction level, obviously you've got to pursue that total quality resolution. In doing that, you can definitely increase call durations to the portion where you would take out maybe an entire analyst or maybe two analysts in order to get that resolution for a period of time, at times up to an hour, even.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
And with that said, Bomgar allowed us, again, to engage those highly technical resources in a more cost effective manner to bring that resolution to the end user. As we progressed through the pilot, we also found that our mean time to resolution was actually reduced because, as the analyst was able to go into the machine ... with the end user in front of them, they no longer had to rely on the end user to interpret complicated error messages, basically application induced errors that would then be difficult to translate in the appropriate technical speak back to my analysts. So, they were able to see what the end user was seeing and then resolve the problem in a more time efficient manner.
And as this technician was able to get into the unit to facilitate that resolution, then that also helped prevent escalation to desk-side and reduce the desk-side visit requirement, because then we were able to see the exact situation that the end user was seeing. And it really cut down on the fact that people would just send the desk-side guy over, because they felt like that they had someone there that was strong enough with the right skills to solve their problem on the telephone. So, it actually reduced requests for desk-side support through frustration, feeling like the end user was not getting anyplace.
Also, with Bomgar, through the record feature and the capability to record the fix and the resolution, when we did escalate to second-level or third-level support or application developers, they were able to record that fix, and then push that level-two, level-three fix back through the roof to the level-one analysts, because then, even if they didn't have the particular technical skill set to resolve the problem, they had the steps in front of them, and it became very intuitive.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
So, then we were able to resolve more at level one. And by being able to resolve more at level one, it help in a lot of different areas, including incident management and escalation management, because, as we brought that resolution to the level-one analyst, then when we had a particular outage or incident, they were able to then take that fix and deploy it in a more timely manner as opposed, again, to a parent/child relationship in the incident with queuing a bunch of tickets for your level-two, level-three support groups to have to get back to to confirm those resolutions, or even at times to apply that fix.
So, it really gave us a good vehicle to bring some more complicated resolutions back down through the roof to level one to deploy them in a more timely manner, which then, with the incident management phase, allowed us to return more people back to service in a more timely manner which in turn, as we all know in interdependencies, it increases customer satisfaction. And then, when you get to the call structure you get your people back to work quicker and being more productive, even when you have a particular outage or a particular incident that then would affect multiple people. So, it really allowed us to minimize that impact.
Also, in reference to fixes being able to be redeployed back through the roof, knowledge base enhancement. And I know a lot of the buzzwords out there today in different arenas are knowledge-centric solutions. We're definitely on board with that, because you have to be able to push those more complicated fixes back down to level one, which will allow you to resolve more at the desk either through first-call resolution or through first-level resolution so you can then reduce those desk side visits.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
And then, when you're in enterprise environment where you have to send technicians to multiple locations, which, as the previous speaker mentioned, you may have to put them in vehicles. There's fuel requirements, there's time to on-site requirements, there's drive back to their base of operations. But, then within that timeframe, when they're fixing one problem or one incident, they can't be someplace else fixing another. So, it allows you to have a better prepared, more efficient, deployable workforce as well, because you're resolving more at the first call and at the first level.
We also found that, in PC deployments, that this became a very useful tool because, when you're in refresh mode across multiple sites, multiple states, you can then take that high-dollar, highly skilled labor set, you can bring them into your support desk. Then ... and this is not to ... meant to be callous. This is just operational ... you can then hire a more cost effective labor set to then ... but, while maintaining a customer service labor set that's very customer service oriented, but not necessarily highly technical. You can then deploy that hardware, that PC refresh, to the locations into the field.
And then, you have your experts, like your Microsoft certified systems engineers or your MCSAs, your systems administrators back at your service desk that then you can spread that knowledge and that intellect across more deployable sites and more machines in a more cost effective manner. And bottom line is is you just ... you don't need as many of those highly technical resources. You can use that lower cost labor set in order to effect a better production output, if you will.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
Also, as I previously mentioned, with improved escalation management, as you're dealing with your resolvable cause at the desk, there is a difference. There is resolvable and non-resolvable. There's certain calls that come into your support desk that will not be resolvable. And that may be due to specific access requirements, due to contract. You may be even supporting across vendors, where you might have application development or level-three support. In some cases, I have customers that have level-two support that is then outsourced to another vendor.
Escalation management becomes very, very important in those situations because you have to have the right diagnosis to the right team at the right time, because, as the previous speaker mentioned, you do have SLA requirements that, nowadays, they're generally penalties opposed if you do not meet those service level requirements. So, you have to get the right diagnosis to the right team at the right time.
And Bomgar allows us to do that by having that highly skilled technician go into the machine, get the appropriate error code, basically view the situation, and then bring that error code, that particular situation via recording to that vendor, that level-two, that level-three team, which then reduces callbacks to the end user for required information, for stuff that really should have been done at the level-one phase. They didn't have the problem. Almost real-time. It's almost like having the level-two, level-three person at the desk side so they can resolve the problem for the end user. And that definitely increases customer satisfaction, because then you get a seamless solution that is then resolved in a timely manner with reduced callbacks.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
So, with those particular points mentioned, I'll kind of go back and refrain. Bomgar proved to be the right way for Pomeroy IT Solutions to deliver a quality of service in a timely manner. And it was able to increase our speed of service. It positively impacted our incident management, our escalation management, but then it also put the power within the level one analyst hands to take better care of the end user and resolve their problem in a more timely manner. And then, it also brought the customer into the fix process where they felt like they actually had an analyst right there at their desk resolving the issue for them.
And with that said, in today's environment, sales force is very important to business, very important to strategic and tactical alignment. We were able to support sales teams in the field as long as they had an Internet connection. Whether they be at the local Starbucks, at the client site, any place that had an Internet connection, we were then able to extend world-class help desk services to those individuals. We were also able to do that on an international scale.
We had particular situations where we had a customer that is the oil field services business that has their employees at their customers' location provide valuable services, very high-dollar services. And we were able to support those folks as long as they had an Internet connection, whether they be in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska or whether they be on the energy searcher off the coast of Malaysia. We're able to find that those end users became very satisfied that we were able to bring that world-class service, no matter their location, as long as they had an Internet connection.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
So, this product proved to be very operationally effective, increased customer satisfaction, increased cost take-out with value. So, it hit on all the positive points that we were looking for in a standardized tool. And it really enabled us to bring a really robust offering to our clients, and the Holy Grail, the customer's customer. So, all aspects proved to be positive in our pilot and brought some operational data that then we could take back to our business and say we're strategically and tactically aligned with our customers, and we're bring cost take out with value. And with that, Chris, I'll turn it back over to you. And I would image that we will have questions and answers at the end of this presentation.
Chris Watson, VP of Strategic Alliances, Bomgar Corporation:
Yes, that's correct, Clay. Thank you very much. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Before we get started, I just want to quickly go to ... give you a quick snapshot of who Bomgar is. We are ... 100 percent of our time, energy and resources are focused on developing the most advanced remote support solutions. And our offering is really a clientless remote support solution that's been designed to give 100 percent access to virtually any system, whether it's a desktop or a server, it's attended or unattended system, whether it's inside or outside the firewall. Whether it's Windows, Windows Mobile, Mac, or Linux machines, Bomgar is focused on giving you access anywhere, any time.
We're also focused on giving you 100 percent control over your environment. The Bomgar deployment model is appliance-based, very uniquely, unlike many of the software and service vendors on the market today. And what this does is the appliance sits within your four walls, giving you complete control and knowledge of where your sensitive data is 100 percent of the time. And since our ownership model is one of true ownership versus renting, you can accurately predict your cost. And there's no more monthly surprises or overage fees.
Chris Watson, VP of Strategic Alliances, Bomgar Corporation:
So, at Bomgar we have a full range of solutions. And so, depending on the size and shape of your business, we really have everything from the individual--from the enterprise organization down to the individual needs. And we have over 4,500 organizations that currently rely on Bomgar today. And from an enterprise standpoint, we understand that enterprise organizations need to be able to easily integrate various best-of-breed solutions into their current infrastructure. So, that's why we designed our product with very open APIs, a software development kit, those types of things that make it very easy for you to integrate the Bomgar solution with other systems, which everything from service desk management systems, CRM systems, systems management solutions.
So ... we also understand the need to be able to configure our ... your system to match your business processes. So, we've mapped ours ... our product according to best practices such as ITIL in mind and give you the configuration capabilities to set it up however suits your business the best. So ... and as Lisa mentioned, today I'll be providing some real-world scenarios from Bomgar customers who have been able to use our solution to generate tangible business value. And that's mainly around cost reduction and better customer responsiveness and meeting those service level agreements. But, before we do that, I want to go to the polling question, where I'd like to get a better understanding of really how you feel ... what you feel the primary responsibility of the remote support solution in your organization.
I noticed that many of you had had a solution in place for three years. So, how do you view that product, and what does it really mean? What does it do for your organization? Is it more about minimizing the need to dispatch technicians or reduce your call resolution times? Or is it more about meeting a security ... the ... a service level agreement and--or reducing the cost? So, I'll take a minute to give everybody a chance to answer the polling questions. And then, once you have checked your answer, then just hit "submit".
Chris Watson, VP of Strategic Alliances, Bomgar Corporation:
I actually think we're having a few technical difficulties on that. So, in the results that we send out to everybody, we'll just ... apologize for that. But, we'll be able to send you those responses in a follow-up. So, moving on to, you know, really what we've been hearing consistently, what we heard from Clay with Pomeroy, we hear consistently over and over with our different customer organizations that bringing in the right remote support solution can really have a dramatic impact on your ability to cut costs and improve your responsiveness to customers.
And that can come in many different forms, whether it's, you know, improving your mean time to repair and seeing a big reduction in the number of reps that you need to handle the same volumes. Or, it can be in the form of a ... you know, a customer being able to reduce the number of call escalations, which can therefore, you know, improve your first call resolution rate. And we'll also look today at a solution where ... a situation where a customer was able to avoid significant penalties, like Lisa mentioned. A lot of those can have a significant impact on the profitability of your organization with meeting those security level agreements.
And so, to do this, I've pulled a couple of examples, just the next three slides, from the Bomgar assessment tools that we have in place. It's really a simple tool that helps companies not only document a baseline of where the key metrics are before they implement their remote support solution, but also help them track progress and savings as that remote support function becomes more and more critical in your customer support strategies.
Chris Watson, VP of Strategic Alliances, Bomgar Corporation:
So, you know ... but, we're determined to keep this assessment tool very, very simple, very practical and doable, unlike a lot of the solutions that are--or tools out there today, it can get, you know, mounds of data and highly sensitive information that needs to be tossed over, as well. So, as you'll see in the next few slides, there ... our assessment tool requires very minimal view of the data, and is typically very available within your organization. So, I've pulled a few ... these slides that ... from some specific customer examples where customers have used the Bomgar solution to improve efficiencies and better--be more responsive to the customers.
The first one is--the first scenario is the customer had about 150 support representatives on staff, and they were able ... they were handling about an average of 12 incidents a day each. And the customer estimated they'd be able to increase the capacity of these reps by about 30 percent with the right remote support solution in hand. This meant reducing their mean time to repair with access to all of the systems inside and outside of their firewall. They had customers located in far-flung parts of the world and behind firewalls at different locations. It also meant being able to virtually deploy the right resource to resolve the incidences in the fastest time possible.
So, this 30 percent reduction you'll see here in the calculations increased the number of incidents each rep could handle to up to 15.5 a day. And if the volume remained the same, the organization could actually reduce the number of reps required to handle this volume ... about 37 full-time employees. And when the company multiplied this number times the all-in compensation of these reps, they were able to calculate about $1.8 million in savings. And these resources can be redeployed to other strategic initiatives around the business, things like call avoidance programs and such.
Chris Watson, VP of Strategic Alliances, Bomgar Corporation:
In our next scenario, this customer was concerned about the number of calls that were being escalated. They identified that that was a big cost and an area of improvement that they wanted to impact. So, as you can see here, about 25 percent of the customer's incidents were being escalated. And if you're ... to take the industry average numbers for call escalations there, you'll see that the cost can increase dramatically as that call moves up from level one to level two to level three.
And we learned from SSPA that they estimate about a 200 ... over a 200 percent increase as that call moves up that chain. For this customer ... and our tool enables ... in the yellow fields enable you to take your own estimates and plug those in with your own numbers. For this customer, they estimated their costs were around 100 percent more as that call escalated. And with the right remote support solution in place, they estimated that they could reduce those call escalations or, you know, improve their first-call resolution rates by 20 percent. And when they calculated that cost savings based on some productivity metrics, they were able to show nearly a $300,000 improvement cost savings.
And our final slide here is a third example. It's from a customer who was really concerned about the number of service level agreement breaches that they were experiencing. They handled about 1,600 incidences each month, but about 10 percent of those required additional attention and time, which often resulted in penalties that totaled more than $75,000 a year. And that was just for one customer.
Chris Watson, VP of Strategic Alliances, Bomgar Corporation:
So, they were able to use the Bomgar solution to better identify the root cause analysis, as Lisa mentioned. And they estimated that, with that capability and the ability for the rep to be side-by-side virtually in the system that was having a problem, they'll be able to reduce that number by 40 percent, which in the end resulted in a $45,000 a year savings. And so, with that it was very easy to see how the system could easily pay for itself just within one--by affecting one area of the business.
And so, we ... I've given you some examples of this assessment tool. We ... you know, this is just one of many scenarios that we have in the tool, and we've work through our ... with that with our customers and prospects. Looking at these potential savings, like Lisa said, can really be an eye-opener for a lot of organizations. So, I see it time and time and again, and we really work with ... we encourage each of our customers or prospects to walk through this process with us. It's been tested in many situations to help customers really understand, document the value that they can achieve, and the business impact that remote control can have on their ability to reduce their costs and increase their service level ... ability to meet their service level agreements.
So, I'd ... I would challenge each of you to contact us. On the last slide there's the contact information. You can either go to our website, e-mail me or call me directly if you?re interested in walking through this exercise with us to see what--using your numbers and your estimations, what remote support could do for you. And with that, I'll turn it back over to Rauli. I know we only have five minutes left, but we can hopefully address a few questions.
Raleigh Gould, Moderator:
Thank you, Chris. Yes. Before we jump into the Q&A portion of today's event, I did want to let you know, as Chris just mentioned, you can find out more about Bomgar by visiting the URL listed on this slide. Additionally, I would like to let you know that you can register for EMA's free online IT Management Solution Center at itsolutions.emausa.com. Here you can find out more about SLM and BSM, as well as other IT management topics. So, with that being said, I'm just going to go ahead and jump right into the questions. First, Clay, I'll address this first question to you. Did you use a remote control product prior to Bomgar? How has the appliance benefited your environment?
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
Yes, we did use ... we used multiple remote control tools. We used VNC. We also used DameWare, as well as--really, we had several other remote access tools that were available to us across customer contracts. And we found, with this particular appliance, we were able to standardize the remote tool offering and all the benefits that Bomgar brought to those environments, and with the ease of use, the ease of training to our analysts, and then the recording capability became a big feature because we were able to then redeploy those fixes. But, then we also had a recorded history of the particular fix for our knowledge base, for our customers, for our support teams. And those other solutions that we used in the different environments were not nearly as robust as Bomgar proved to be.
Clay Guinn, GSD Operations Manager, Pomeroy IT Solutions:
And what we also found is is that, with Bomgar and the capability to drill to specific applications, allowed my customers to then give the security to particular employees that ... where we were only supposed to support certain applications. Then, we could drill down to those applications. And it also put my customers at ease, and it also put particular employees at ease that had certain secure due to HIPAA regulations and other things of that nature, that we should only support a particular application. Then, it allowed the security measures necessary to create that trust relationship. So, compared with those other tools in the environment, Bomgar allowed us to deliver that quality of service, and then increase our speed of service with the necessary security measures to make the end users and the customers feel at ease.
Raleigh Gould, Moderator:
Thank you very much, Clay. And actually, we're ... it looks like we're just at the hour. So, unfortunately we're not going to be able to answer any additional questions. But, I did want to provide a contact information for Chris Watson from Bomgar, as well as Bruce Leeman from EMA. And wanted to thank all of our speakers today for their time, as well as all of our attendees. We thank you for joining us, and have a nice day.