Remote Support in 2007: Solution Requirements

Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, Bomgar™:
This is Bomgar's take on ease of use. This is how you get connected. User clicks and the rep gets control. It's usually around a ten to fifteen second process. You also need to consider what reporting capabilities the solution has. You want something that gives you reporting in real time so as soon as the data is in you're able to run reports on it. it gives you a lot of drill down capabilities so you can get really granular with your reports. That allows you to export the data into CSV or XLS format so that you can run further reports on it. And, this is interesting as well, there's actually competitors of ours that charge to have you download the data that you run through your remote control sessions. With us it's kind of ... since it's on the appliance, it's your data. You own the box as well as the data that it contains.

You want something as well that allows you to track closely client side changes. This protects your company from liability. Because, if there is any ambiguity about what a customer or what a rep did during a support session, you need to be able to go back and conclusively determine whether or not something took place.

Data transfer also needs to be logged and be reportable so you can know if there's any files or folders that were transferred. You also want something that allows you to get customer feedback and to track that over time. And, something that allows you to track incident resolution rates. After all, that's kind of one of the key performance indicators about how well you're doing in your support department.

Here's just a screenshot of our session recording feature. This let's you get a complete video session recording of each and every session. So, you can see exactly what happens during a session. Not only that, you can also see who performed the action. So, if it was a rep that clicked a file or deleted something, or changed the setting, you know it was the rep and not the customer.