Reducing Costs and Improving Service with Remote Support

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.