Reducing Costs and Improving Service with Remote Support

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.