Remote Support: How Secure Are You?

Bill Rose, SSPA:
Let me just start by setting the stage a little bit. My first slide is titled, "Poking Customer with a Stick." I just wanted to take you back a while so we don't kind of forget what's happened to our customers over the last ten years. Everything that's listed on this page is something that I bet all of us wish we could take back. I mean, we've created some real challenges for our customers, things like busy signals and hold times; and we've put inexperienced support reps on the front end, we've used paper-based systems, we've sent bad code in the self-inflected wound kind of approach, we've had installation issues with our products, and of course, we've had some bad documentation - the old RTFM, "Read The Fat Manual" type of approach. So all of these things are pretty good indications that at times, our industry doesn't do all the right things. And as we look to remote support, we really want to try to figure out what is it that we can do that will ensure that we are doing the right things and making sure that we're not making a mistake in any form or fashion.

So let's just look at the next line. We've talked about technical support transitions; we've actually made a lot of transitions, and these transitions have been very positive in a lot of ways. And I think they're positive because we've delivered better service than we ever had in the past, but we've also reduced the cost of service. So if you look at the top of this chart, and it talks about on-site support, and look at the bottom of the chart that talks about remote support, you can see the difference in cost between these two is pretty amazing. On-site, you take a senior technician, put him on an airplane, fly him out to a customer environment; relative to the bottom of the chart, which talks about remote support where our people have the ability to dial into a customer environment and pretty much do the same thing: Take control and effectively resolve issues without the on-site expense.