Reducing Costs and Improving Service with Remote Support

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.