Reducing Costs and Improving Service with Remote Support

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?