Resolution Times Decrease 75 Percent with
Appliance-Based Remote Support

Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
I want to focus my story on our technical support department because this is where we were having the biggest problem connecting to our customers' PCs. We have 24 employees and they're distributed between Seattle and our office, our technical support office, in Columbia, Missouri. Most customers are doctor's offices that are typically less than 100 PCs and they really don't have anybody that knows too much about PCs and troubleshooting PCs. So, they rely on us to help them quite a bit. We've had some metrics that we were measuring prior to our choice of Bomgar™ product and one of those is the meeting response time. We were measuring the meeting resolution time as well as customer satisfaction.

For instance, every customer that calls in is sent a survey and we also measure our support revenue. When customers are not happy with our support and their issues there we typically have had to give discounts in order to keep them as customers.

Now, I'd like to set up the problem that we were facing in April of 2005. Our current remote control software was really not up to the current technology and security demands of 2005. We were using pcAnywhere™. First of all, there was a cost associated to it for our customers' standpoint. They had to buy a license and we also had to buy a license for it. They had to – we were using typically dial-up lines at the time. The stream refresh rates were a bit slow when we did that. pcAnywhere also worked over the internet as well so that did help in some cases. There was also limited access at the site. For instance, customers would only install it on one PC but typically were troubleshooting problems on a variety of different PCs at the office, or perhaps even on their server.

There were also security concerns. Encryption was not easily enforced on pcAnywhere and customers would set up passwords but there wasn't any kind of a strong password management or requirements on their end. So, this left them vulnerable to attack, especially over the internet. And then finally, there were versioning conflicts. pcAnywhere would update their software - upgrade the software every year and, with newer versions, there were version incompatibilities as customers would have a newer version than we would or we would have a newer version than our customers would.