Reducing Costs and Improving Service with Remote Support

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.