Providing Excellent Support in Difficult Economic Times
View or Listen to this Bomgar™ Webcast:
March 24, 2009View video | Read Transcript
HOST:
Good day everyone. Welcome to this Help Desk Incident SPIN conference call. At this time I'd like to introduce Rich Hand. Please go ahead sir.
RICH HAND:
Welcome everyone to today's HDI SPIN webinar. I'm Rich Hand, executive director of membership here at HDI, and I hope to see many of you at the conference in Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to the presentation today as well by Mitch Bryant who is an HDI member and support manager for Norton Healthcare Systems. Today, Mitch is presenting 'Providing excellent support in difficult economic times'. Our good friends over at Bomgar are sponsoring today's webinar and we truly appreciate their support in helping us to bring this series to our membership. We will hear from Bomgar's executive vice president of marketing in a moment to discuss how Bomgar is helping organizations reduce cost in these challenging times. So, let me tell you a little about our presenter today, Mitch Bryant. Mitch is the support manager for Norton Healthcare Service Center. Norton Health Care is Louisville Kentucky's leading hospital and healthcare system and second largest private employer, a not-for-profit system, the largest in Kentucky and rated one of the top 100 integrated healthcare delivery systems in the country. It includes four large hospitals in Louisville, 10 Norton immediate care centers, 9,700 employees, 280 employed medical providers at some 50 locations and nearly 2,000 total physicians on its medical staff. Norton Healthcare serves the greater Louisville metro area including Southern Indiana and patients throughout Kentucky. Mitch has over 26 years of customer service experience with an emphasis on the full support within several disciplines. He has spent years planning and managing held desk involvement in the roll outs, so that call center staff are prepared to meet user support needs. He has been published in our HDI support world and has a multitude of articles posted on techrepublic.com, many of which have been included in their professional series books. He has recently written one of our HDI focus books coming out soon titled 'Bridging the Gap to Your Customers". Mitch is retired from the US NAVY serving most of his career in the submarine force. Thank you Mitch. The foundation of his passion for customer service and team work was honed from his long service in the United States submarine force where it was essential to work as a team. Mitch is ITIL certified. He is HDI Support Center Analyst certified. He is a member of the local Toastmasters Club and he is pursuing the HDI instructor certification. We look forward to his presentation today. He will join us in a moment. I would like to kick off today's presentation with the executive vice president of Bomgar Brad Prizer, to take us through a few slides of what Bomgar is doing for their customers in these challenging economic times. Brad, why don't you take it away?
BRAD PRIZER:
Thank you very much Rich and hello everyone. My name is Brad Prizer. I'm the EVP of marketing for Bomgar Corporation and I would really like to welcome you to this HDI SPIN webinar sponsored by Bomgar. I would like to thank Rich Hand, HDI executive director of membership, for hosting today's event and again for Mitch Bryant, the support manager at Norton Healthcare, who is presenting on today's topic from a practitioner's point of view. So let's get started.
In today's economy you really can't afford to cut support. None of us can. That's why today's webinar 'providing excellent support in difficult economic times' will really ring true for a lot of us. It's a case study of what Norton Healthcare is doing to continue high quality support services while reducing costs through the utilization of remote support technology. At Bomgar we view remote support technology to be a critical part of the support function and it is also a great way to reduce costs, especially in this economy. As a provider for Enterprise Remote Support Solutions, we like to keep things SIMPLE as the acronym in this line depicts. By this we mean that your remote support solutions should have the attributes of, first, security. So, allowing remote sessions to be completely secure, integration--or being fully integrated--with leading service desk solutions, a high level of manageability making it configurable for workflows, provides reporting and monitoring that you need, supports multiple operating systems and platforms, provides quick return on investment by improving productivity, which can lead to lower costs and has an enterprise focus, which means it has a full suite of features and functionality. Most of these areas are going to be highlighted by Mitch during his presentation. However, today's topic leads us to focus on the lower costs part of the simple philosophy that we have here at Bomgar.
We all know in today's economic climate, support organizations really must maintain a superior customer experience and really find solutions to help face those issues such as shrinking IT budgets, having to retain employees under mounting IT pressures related to mobile work forces and all the disparate technologies that go along with it. Bomgar remote support solutions allow enterprise organizations to address all of these issues while lowering costs at the same time. By doing that first, by leveraging productivity with Bomgar, support organizations save money by making support teams really more productive. Bomgar allows support reps to handle multiple support sessions at a time, escalate issues to different levels or teams and utilize chat to solve issues while capturing and integrating that chat session data into your ticketing system. Secondly, through concurrent licenses, Bomgar's licensing model is based on simultaneous usage, not named account usage, like some other solutions. In addition, licenses can be shared between shifts and teams and still maintain that proper accountability that you need. This typically allows support organizations to buy approximately 20 to 40% less or fewer licenses, which in turn saves money and impacts the bottom line in a short term. In fact, we've seen customers with an ROI within six to nine months in our experience. Third, through one-time costs, Bomgar licensing utilizes a one-time cost model, rather than a monthly fee based on usage.
So with Bomgar, you own the technology, which again attributes to your clients quick return on investment. So before we turn it over to Mitch, we'd just really like you to visit our web site--and you can see it's listed here at www.bomgar.com/healthcare. Through this you can learn how health care organizations like Norton HealthCare and others are satisfying federal compliance standards, like HIPPA, with secure auditable data and supporting decentralized organizations with Bomgar Enterprise Remote Support. So, at this point we'd like to thank you again and thank HDI again for the chance to sponsor this SPIN webinar. So, without any further delay, I'd like to turn it over to Mitch Bryant, support manager for Norton Healthcare. Mitch.
MITCH BRYANT:
Thank you very much Brad and thank you very much Rich. Welcome fellow HDI colleagues. It is my pleasure today to talk about remote service and support. Norton Healthcare has been providing care in the area for over a century. We have approximately 200 IS employees that provide care for over 9,500 employees, hundreds of physicians. We actually are opening up our fifth hospital this fall and we are very excited. Our fifth hospital is truly going to leverage some amazing technology that we will retro-fit back into our other hospitals. A few things about the Norton Service Center, we are staffed and support 24/7 365 days a year. We never close. Our monthly call volume is about 9,000 calls average a month; we have more than 4,000 external customers. We have approximately 6,500 PC's, as well as 1500 network printers on our systems. We also deploy about 1,100 personal wireless devices and none of these figures will include the actual things that we are going to include in our actual hospitals. We do an amazing amount of personal wireless devices and we like to also use our remote support tools to support them as well. I've attended many HDI webinars and I always seem to come away from them with at least a couple good ideas or helpful tips and it is certainly my hope today that you'll be able to do that with this presentation.
What's the importance of remote support? I think this says it all. The ability to directly experience what the customer is seeing is the best way to 1) quickly and efficiently make an impact to the cost of a call and 2) increase the satisfaction of the customer and your support team. We all know that seeing what the customer has in front of them is the key to successful support calls and certainly lowering cost. So here are our objectives and concerns when we are starting to look for an actual solution. We wanted to lower costs, we wanted some significant features, we wanted it to be adopted by the support team as well as our customers. We had to have security around the whole thing and we wanted to make sure that we got a product that had good quality, had a good name brand, a solid reputation as well as solid support behind it.
To start our search we defined our audience. We not only checked out what our external customers would need, but as well as the staff that would be using the tool. While making customers happy with our support was our primary objective, we also knew that if we didn't have the support team 100% on board that their adoption would make the process fail. I am very happy to say that we did a lot of checking around with a lot of tools and this one tool was 110% voted on by the entire staff. I almost can't even get them to vote on something when I have to set a deadline for them, but they actually all complimented and all agreed that this was the support tool that we needed to do. We all know that operating systems become more complex and add to our inability to handle some of the issues and challenges within our in-house tools. Everybody knows, this is for example, with user controls, will always seem to break something that you've put out there. Hand held usage had increased significantly for us and this presented even more of a complex challenge for us to take care of.
So, we started hunting for solutions. I will admit, it took us quite a while to finally decide on one. I was able to use HDI conferences. I was able to get a comparison Excel spreadsheet and I literally walked around with my HDI back pack with my spreadsheet in hand and I walked around to every potential vendor at the conference and I challenged them on their product. I asked them to rate their product, how much their product could handle and all of these features and I actually learned something with almost every vendor that I could go back to each of the vendors and speak with. So, it was actually a wonderful opportunity for me to take not only the HDI conference with everything I've learned, but get to meet all the vendors over the couple of days to be able to check out their solutions. So, we had already tried several in-house tools. Everything from creating packages, to an FTP site loaded with lots of how-to guides, we surveyed our customers on their experience and how they felt their current support is going, we asked each of our analysts about the experience. We created a wish list. We also listed our central security and regulatory concerns. Obviously as a hospital we are very concerned about HIPPA and I can tell you that we tried multiple solutions. We actually did several proof of concepts where we either installed the application, installed the appliance or used something remotely hosted. Obviously, since you can't take into account all the different kinds of configurations that might be on a computer, it was actually impossible to find a best home grown tool. We went through several iterations of trying a couple of things, using FTP sites etc.. We really found that we spent way too much time changing to modify either our install packages or our quick guides. Every time we turned around someone had a slightly different version, everything from Vista to the seven home-grown flavors of the web browsers. So, we basically decided that we couldn't continue with a home grown tool.
Hopefully everybody can see this on their screen, but this was actually one of our real pain points. We actually recently got a call from someone who could not install an application and when we Bomgar'd--as we call it--in to them we found over a dozen tool bars installed. We certainly spent quite a few minutes trying to help them with their tool bars from there. But, as you can see as an analyst flying blindly trying to support, what you consider, a simple install of an application,--a remote access type of capability--it would be almost impossible with all the challenges you would have with this type of set up and you haven't even gotten to the basic operating system and do they have admin rights? and can they walk through this will all the ActiveX popping up. So, our goal: We wanted instant value. We wanted remote support solutions offering amazing value to the success of our service center. We needed them to shorten the time to resolve technical problems, increase our productivity and reduce the cost associated with managing and maintaining all the systems. We simply did not want to have to continue to maintain packages as well as installation guides, reference guides--those types of things--when, quite frankly, we were spending more time keeping them up than we were actually helping our customer.
So, what were our goals? We wanted to reduce our costs, we wanted to enhance our security, we obviously wanted to increase customer satisfaction, but we also wanted to ensure that we had team satisfaction as well as increase our usage. We certainly wanted to shorten the length of our calls. Some of our calls could go 30 to 45 minutes for what is now simply a 10 or 15 minute call. We expected and wanted a short ROI and obviously we wanted something that, no matter what the cost was or what the solution, that it could grow with our long haul of whether we were building a new hospital, adding new remote applications or, quite frankly, seeing an explosion in wireless devices. So, we were able to reduce our support costs by increasing our first call resolution and reduce incident handling time. We also enjoyed the concurrent licensing and we eliminated multiple tools for support. We increased our first call resolution by several percentages as we no longer had to escalate the call because we could simply remote into the device and resolve it at a much higher rate. We were able to reduce multiple calls made for the same issue. We had originally...constantly sending tickets back and forth to analysts trying to figure out what this error was that someone was telling us was posted on their screen or we just simply didn't have a clue what they were talking about, so we were going back and forth. We all know, if a customer has to call back multiple times for an issue, they may not ever call back again. Several remote calls can be handled by a single agent if needed. These calls should be able to be cued up, so we definitely had that ability. We were able to apply our skill sets to two different queues and that way that agents could apply themselves into the respective queues.
I'll be quite honest with you, our staff used to absolutely dread taking a remote call. Our ACD system allowed us to see the phone number that someone was calling from and every time you saw a phone number that was coming from outside one of our hospitals it was like 'I'll be happy to pay someone $5 to handle this call.' We figured out our costs for supporting remote users and, to us, it was actually a different cost than an internal customer. Part of the problem is that we had little or no control over most of the contributing factors around remote support and realized that we were not only spending more time on the call, but we were having to bring in other analysts to take a look at this or escalating tickets so someone else could look at it. With our solution we were actually able to increase the availability of our support staff because, quite frankly, they were not on those 30 and 40 minute calls anymore and this obviously allowed our customers to get back to work. They no longer had the extended times on the phone with us. We were able to get in, fix the issue, get out, period. Thanks very much for your call. So, another way that we were able to reduce our costs was reduce our escalation of support calls, we were no longer having to send it over to the senior support analysts, no longer having to get someone else involved in the call because we were basically using one tool that everybody could use. So, we lowered our training needs. It was very quick and easy to learn. The first time we actually set up the Bomgar device, I only gave them about a single page worth of a quick reference guide and I let them go and play. It was absolutely amazing, like kids in a candy store, how well they found everything and they started sending me back information of new things that they found.
We were able to reduce on-site visits. That was a huge savings to us. Our physician support staff was not only able to reduce travel time, but costs on-site were significantly cut especially when a customer was only having one person with an issue or we needed to train remotely. In one location that we used to go to we would drive two hours to the remote site, spend about an hour training someone, drive two hours back and the next week they wanted us to come out again because they hired a new person. Obviously, we needed to maintain our annual costs for whatever solution we had and we were able to have a fixed cost annually without having to worry about what we would incur every time we hired someone. So, here are our successes in the metrics. We increased our first call resolution rate by an additional 55%, we went from low 60's to high 70's almost 80% for remote support. We were able to reduce our handling time for remote support by anywhere from 30 to 60%. We obviously got down to one single tool for support. Our escalations rate decreased by 60%. We were no longer having to send this ticket to someone so they could have a look and then call this customer and then call us back and we finish up the call. Our training needs dropped by 50% because one of the things that we were able to do was we were able to see what the customer was having wrong, we were able to record the calls and play them back for our agents that were not as friendly or not as familiar with the stuff and we also were able to decline our on-site visits by more than 50%.
One of our concerns, obviously as a hospital, was HIPPA compliancy. We needed to make sure that security concerns...that we were not only protecting our network, but we were protecting our customers. We obviously had HIPPA as regulatory affect on all this. We were able to gain secure access via firewalls and obviously we were able to record the calls. We needed to provide the remote support in a safe and secure fashion that our customers could feel comfortable about. We also can audit our calls as well as check on what was going on so the customer has assurance that we either 1) have not left anything behind or 2) we've not done anything wrong. I will admit that my staff has never been called on a problem of 'what did we do and did we mess anything up?' But, it is a very safe feeling to know that if you ever have a complaint, that you can go back to the call and look and see what has happened. Also, part of our security needs was we obviously wanted our data encrypted. Because no matter what, we were looking at patient data or their specific information, so it was very important that we have some form of encryption. There was no need to set up dedicated VPN access like we were setting up with multiple customer sites. We had the ability to allow control of the tool, but also customize it to what the analyst needed. There were no changes made to the customer's device and nothing was left behind for them to worry about whether we were going to sneak back into their system. Ultimately, the customer is in control. They can either allow the access, disallow the access or take it away immediately. We also found with our tool that we can allow our vendors to remotely access our devices, as far as servers, without having to give everybody VPN access and their own access. That also allowed our server team to be able to watch what is going on and also learn from that.
One of the things that we had not truly prepared for when we purchased our tool...everybody knows that you're going to have disasters, but you never really know how you're going to react and what you need until, quite frankly, they happen. Well, recently the area when through two back-to-back local storms. We had the remnants of hurricane Ike and we had an ice storm--six, seven, eight, nine inches of ice everywhere. We had a huge dramatic influx of callers from off site. We had employees that were sent to other locations that never touched a device, never used a PC that they were not used to. We had new devices that literally came out of the wood work. The good thing is that we didn't have to preinstall anything to get them up and running. Quite frankly, with the snow storm and with the ice and the hurricane, there were some places that we couldn't even get to if we physically had to drive out to them. I can tell you one of the best things that we were able to get out of this tool is we didn't have to learn anything new because we had already been using our tool well before the disaster struck. So, for us it was just like another call. Just an overwhelming volume, but it was just like another call.
Our remote support tool is now considered essential support in our list of disaster recovery elements to recover the company. We are actually building a second hot data site and our device is considered in the top 50 devices that must be purchased and that must be up and running at our secondary hot-site at all times so that we can support any disasters or any downtime. Obviously, as you can see on the screen, this is both the call and support team ready to scream at some calls. It is impossible to remain calm and to help someone when you have no clue what they are looking at, they are not sure of the terminology you're using, you're not sure of the terminology they are using, you're asking them if they can see the little yellow bar that is saying click here for the ActiveX and nobody's going anywhere fast. So, once we got our device we actually started listening to the other support teams at Norton IS and we found out that our tool could actually provide them some value. This was an added value that we hadn't even accounted for when we were looking for our ROI. Our desktop support folks could actually use it as well as our physician trainers could train folks without having to drive and our server team could use it to allow a vendor access into the servers without having to give them VPN access. One of our unique support needs we have in one of our hospitals is we have a number of PC's that are in offices we call time-share-suites. We actually provide a Norton PC on the Norton network, but it only has Internet access for visiting doctors to come in and actually have a doctor's office. The problem is our internal tool cannot access that PC because it is not on the domain. So, very quickly we were getting all these calls that my time-share PC is messed up and we were having to send someone there. This was an average of six to eight calls a week and the distance between where our desktop support is and where these devices are is approximately 20 miles, a 20 minute drive. We were actually able to fix almost every call from now on with our tool because, since they had Internet access, we could have them sign up and we were able to access the device. We now have a 90% resolution rate on just those time-share PC's.
So, what actually works for us? Obviously the concurrent license model because I have some folks that I may not see for three or four days, I have night folks that work two or three days on two or three days off and I simply could not pay for everybody to have a named instance and use it two or three days out of the week. We also gained some amazing rich features and little or no maintenance. We were looking for a solution that had amazing capabilities for multi monitored support to file transfers. We also were able to check the user system as far as information. We have chat sessions. We can also reboot and reconnect without the user having to go through a bunch of hoops. We listed this huge grand list and we decided that we would ask each vendor to let us know what on the list they can provide. I listed separately that the multiple OS support...we have them all here. We use Windows, we use Mac, we use Blackberry, we have mobile devices. We have every flavor known to man here or our customers externally are calling in. So, it is very important to us that one tool could support them all as well, obviously, as a hospital. We wanted compliancy for HIPPA and we also wanted to insure that we had secure access for, not only us, but for our customers. We also are able to record all of our sessions and we automatically do that. All analysts understand that their sessions are recorded. We got 100% team buy-in. This was probably the first product that we introduced to the team that got that much buy-in. One of the fantastic results of doing a proof of concept was that everyone on the team got a chance to try it out for a test spin. They voted overwhelmingly 100% to purchase this. We do random surveys anywhere from 40 to 50% of our calls and our customers love this device. These are actual comment from some recent surveys.
"I love to sit back and let them fix my Issues. I wish the place that I bought my PC from could do this. I love the help desk. Even at home they can fix my problem."
That to us was amazing. So, what was crucial to our success? The management and maintenance of the computers and devices truly presents a very complex issue for the support centers. It's never going to stop. They are never going to go away and unfortunately they're never going to get better. They're not going to completely self heal themselves. The support management of the systems via remote access is now crucial to our success. Even for short periods of downtime it's very crucial that we have something that we can support someone. Without a doubt, using remote tools is the most cost effective solution that we found to not only have customer satisfaction, reduced disruption in our productivity and, obviously, retain our customers. Remotely you can view, diagnose and resolve problems for anyone around the world. It doesn't matter that you're not on our network, it doesn't matter that you're in another country. It doesn't matter. As long as you have an Internet connection we can reach you and we can access what we need to access. I want to thank you all very much for the pleasure to present this information on supporting remote users for you today. We've gone through several trials and tribulations of finding something that works for us and my hope is that you'll be able to take this information from this presentation and benefit from it as well. We went through a very long road of trying to save money by doing all kinds of home grown tools to forcing several products to bend to our will. We actually have a VPN device that has a meeting concept and we actually felt that we could use that to force an instant meeting. The first two weeks it was difficult to learn. For the second two weeks we were trying to learn it and shortly thereafter I noticed that no one was using it anymore. It had actually become a burden on our customer and the support center hated it. So, by us trying to force a tool that wasn't actually designed for remote support, it failed. So, ultimately the entire team just decided on a tool that gave us amazing abilities and has little or no maintenance on our part, so we could concentrate on the business of taking care of our customers. Rich, I now turn the presentation back over to you sir.
RICH HAND:
Mitch, thank you very much. I appreciate that and I asked Mitch to leave us plenty of time to talk about some of the ways--of course ask questions about Mitch's process, but sharing amongst the community here on ways that they're being able to provide excellent service in these difficult challenging economic times.
RICH HAND:
Let me just get it kicked off here. I just wanted to ask Mitch. What were the top three things that you were considering during your evaluation of the remote process. I've heard a lot of people go into remote support and most people are doing it, but what were the top three things you were considering.
MITCH BRYANT:
Well, we were looking for how many features we could have. Obviously, our HIPPA compliancy was the most important thing and we needed to make sure that we could control our cost and that was with the concurrent licenses.
RICH HAND:
Ok, very good. Michael asks us:
How well does it perform if the user is on a dial up connection? With virtual support today, I'm sure that is an issue.
MITCH BRYANT:
Dial up is always a challenge. Two years a go--let me tell you just a quick story--we were doing our open enrollment and we had been telling everybody 'please don't wait until the last minute'. I told the HR department that someone will call at the last minute on dial up from E-town, (E-town is about two hours away from us) and it did. It happened. They called five minutes before the end of open enrollment. That year we didn't have our appliance and it was a very difficult call. We ended up asking HR to exempt them and let them fill out papers the next day. But, this year we were able to use our Bomgar device. We had a few folks on dial up. I will admit that there is a little bit of, what we call, "clunkiness". It's a little slow, but we were actually able to make it work pretty good. We were certainly much more successful this year than we were last year when they called on AOL dial up.
RICH HAND:
You mentioned concurrent license model. I want to get Brad in here. Can you explain concurrent license model and how that drives savings, Brad?
BRAD PRIZER:
Sure, absolutely. The nice thing about the concurrent licensing model is that it is really based on what you actually need. So, as Mitch pointed out, it is very expensive if you have to do this on a named licensed basis, so if everyone of his reps had to have a license in order to use Bomgar, that would get astronomically expensive for him. So, the nice thing about the concurrent model is that you just base it on how many reps actually need it at any one given time. So, it's all based on how many reps need to do remote sessions at one time. It's not named licenses and as a result you can usually get 20 to 40% fewer licenses.
RICH HAND:
Excellent, Mark asks Mitch:
What unique feature/function will you be incorporating into your new hospital location?
MITCH BRYANT:
All of the above, we do have an internal tool that we're not ready yet to give up. That's not to say that we're not going to go fully Bomgar, but at our new hospital we're going to have time share locations and we are going to have some amazing marvelous devices. Everything from bedside medication verification to patient tracking to devices that a physician can walk into the hospital and see his patient records any and every device that currently connects to the Internet we can attach to and we can help them with. We can actually see the screen. One of our pain points is really Blackberry's. Blackberry's are amazing tools. We have 500 or 600 here at Norton Healthcare and we were constantly having to create a ticket, send it to a desktop support engineer for two reasons: 1) Only three or four of my staff have them, so there is really no way of understanding what's on the screen and 2) We couldn't reach out and touch them. With our most recent update of Bomgar we're actually able to remote into the screen and even if we are not 100% comfortable with it, it is much easier for us to walk the user through a few things.
RICH HAND:
Very good, John asks Mitch:
What kind of challenge have you experienced with remote clinics and remote devices being locked down and, thus, having limited ability to provide the needed support?
MITCH BRYANT:
Obviously, the single most challenge is if the user had admin rights on the device. We would spend five to ten minutes just trying to figure that out over the phone blindfolded. We haven't really had any challenges. I can honestly tell you that in my year's work of using Bomgar, I've had two devices that we just simply could not get connected to our appliance. As long as they can get the web again, we have a very short support web location. They can sign in or we can give them a session key. They're in. We probably have a 95-98% success rate of getting them into a support session. Now, for internally if it is any of our devices we have an administrative access that we can log into the device, but generally our success rate is 95-98%.
RICH HAND:
Excellent, this goes to both of you I believe:
What ways can support teams save money through the team productivity? You talked about it a few times how your team came together around this remote support model. Can you explain some of the ways you were able to be more efficient and more effective through team productivity?
BRAD PRIZER:
Sure, absolutely. There are a couple things that come to mind. First, reps can handle multiple support sessions at a given time. Obviously, that allows you to do several at time, so that is saving time and productivity there. Also, you can escalate issues to different levels of teams or different teams with different expertise, so that you are fully utilizing those that have the right expertise for maybe the problem that you are dealing with. You can also route sessions to teams with lower activity levels, so you are able to monitor--maybe this team has got some bandwidth available to them to take more sessions--so you can route to them and keep all of your teams fully activated with the right level of productivity.
MITCH BRYANT:
To add to that, you can also add in someone to the support sessions. Our specialty is getting you remote access into the system and getting the application working. We're not very well versed once you get deep into the application and that was always an escalated ticket. Now, we're able to put the caller on hold, call the analyst, the analyst can actually join the sessions and not only am I taking care of the technical aspects, but I am learning what the analyst is looking at and teaching the customer and the customer has this all on one call, one nice neat package, and not being told 'well I'll escalate a ticket and someone will call you back.' When they are on the phone they need the help then, not two and a half hours later. So, we saw a huge impact to that.
RICH HAND:
Yeah, that definitely drives your First Call Resolution as well I'm sure. You take of it one time and you're not bouncing it around. Bryan asks here:
Do you have established level service specifically for remote support? For example: They will not attempt to troubleshoot a connection to ISP or home wireless networks, they must have a connection to the Internet before they provide remote support. Do you have any kind of service levels that way?
MITCH BRYANT:
They're not that defined. Obviously, we can't use our remote agent tool if you are not connected to the Internet, but we will certainly help you the best that we can. We don't physically support your router and the reason why your PC is not connected. I find that if I can spend about three to five minutes with them and give them some suggestions, we've been fairly successful with that. I will admit to Bryan's point, if you can't get on the Internet it is really impossible for me to help you from this perspective because you can't even remotely access our network. We try our best within a few minutes and if not we suggest that you take it to your local store. If they are in the area we do have a DSL line that is off our network and we will offer to let them come in and we will try to get them remotely connected and that generally will help us decide whether it is their internal network or their router because if we can take their PC and sit it down next to our DSL line trying to connect, that certainly gives them something to show.
RICH HAND:
Our good friend Cynthia wants to know Mitch:
Can you expand on the difficulties you have supporting the wireless devices and how has this remote tool been of benefit or are there still some issues that you can't resolve no matter what the tool is?
MITCH BRYANT:
I think Blackberry's are the most predominant thing that I can use as a success story. When we started full blown using Blackberry's, for a while it was just maybe 100 of them and then they started giving them out like left and right. We started to find that folks--let's say you're a novice computer user and now you've given them another device that's got a whole different way of working. Now they want to use their Blackberry. Because the service center simply didn't have a Blackberry and didn't use it, we weren't well versed in it. Once we started supporting Blackberry's via the Norton Service Center, we obviously cut down on escalated tickets, we cut down the concern of the customer 'when is someone going to get to me?', but we were very successful in being able to remote into the Blackberry and even if we weren't familiar with that version of the Blackberry software, I must admit, we were pretty successful. It certainly cut down my questions because instead of coming to me and me handing them my Blackberry so they could walk through it, they're actually able to see the users Blackberry.
RICH HAND:
Adam asks Brad:
Can you expand on the chat feature? I'm sure you can too Mitch. Can you expand on the chat feature with the remote support?
BRAD PRIZER:
Yeah, absolutely. It is probably one of the most popular features that we have with Bomgar, is the chat feature. Obviously, being able to do that live while you're doing a remote session, you can ask all kinds of questions. Someone can bring up some anecdotal information that maybe you couldn't have gotten otherwise. So, having that chat sessions and having that direct communication with the rep that you're working with is one of our most popular features and the fact that there are some customers of ours that picked Bomgar solely because we can provide that remote chat feature along with our remote support. So, it is a great tool--a super tool.
MITCH BRYANT:
I think Brad said it all. Everybody is getting quite used to instant messaging and chatting and those types of things. While we have not embraced instant messaging with the service center, we thoroughly love the chat feature. While you are sitting there waiting for something to install for the next two or three minutes, it is really nice for the customer to be able to chat with you. I have taken two calls at once where I've told the customer 'hey it looks like I'm going to need a few minutes to install this, can I call you right back because there's no reason for you to need to listen to our elevator music. I've got another call on the cue or, quite frankly, you can chat amongst yourselves without any kinds of concerns.' Our customers use it for "how are you today" and our technicians use it for just simple information back and forth.
TRACY:
We were wondering, does it require software on the customers work station in order to remote through it?
MITCH BRYANT:
That's a great question and yes it does. When you go to our URL and you initiate a session, there is a very small application that has to download, it asks you for permission from the agent to start the remote session and from that point we actually have full access to their device. When the session is over or the customer decides that you are no longer in control, that application actually uninstalls itself and presents the customer with a pop-up that says the application is gone. Brad can speak to the technical aspect, but what I tell some of our customers that are concerned is there is a unique session key created for each time and once that session is over we don't reuse those, so there is no way for me--after you have gone for the night--to remote back into your machine because the very small applet that had to be installed, is gone.
BRAD PRIZER:
I think you hit the nail right on the head Mitch. The one thing I just want to make clear that there is no pre-existing software that needs to be resonant on the clients PC or laptop. As Mitch described, it is downloaded at the time you're doing the session. There is no foot print that remains or needs to be there ahead of time.
CALLER:
Do you have any government agencies as customers?
BRAD PRIZER:
Absolutely we do. We have a whole area within our organization that services both the federal government, as well as state and local. We're finding that there is a lot of interest in it because of the regulations they have to adhere to with their data as well. We find that the vertical industries that are highly regulated are really working well for us because of the security aspect of our product.
AUDREY:
My name is Audrey. Is it possible for us to kind of get a reference of customers, government related customers, that may be utilizing your product?
BRAD PRIZER:
Sure. We'd be happy to get with you one-on-one and provide you a list of references that you could use depending on what your application is and so on. We'd be happy to do that for you.
MITCH BRYANT:
Audrey, to let you know our process, we actually ask for three references. It's a required part of RFP . We actually asked our rep--someone at the help desk, roughly our size and we didn't care what industry it was, we needed someone our size and about our volume--we need someone that had the device for quite some time and then we also wanted someone with healthcare. It was easy to find and we didn't have a problem. We were introduced on the call and the rep left and we spoke for probably 20 or 30 minutes each call.
CALLER:
The only other question we had is--again this is for Brad--in going to this website, does it actually allow us to see the product, see a demo of the product?
BRAD PRIZER:
Yes. You can actually request a trial and be able to view it that way. So, yes it does allow you to do that.
RICH HAND:
Thank you guys, we appreciate that very much.
ADAM:
I'm sorry. This is Adam, can you hear me? Hi there. I had a couple of questions kind of leading into a couple of questions that have already been asked. The first part of it was the chat feature. Does that allow the ability for someone to chat without having that connection of being connected to them remotely, where they could just establish a chat connection for assistance without necessarily being remoted into them?
BRAD PRIZER:
The chat function is part of the remote session functionality. So, it is designed to go along with that remote support aspect of the product.
ADAM:
Okay. The second part I had was the remote capabilities of connecting to someone--I work for a large agricultural company and we have locations that, say there at an elevator, where we need to connect to a PC that needs to do some kind of maintenance to software that is currently on that PC. There may not be someone manned at that location at the time we need to do this. So, we use a tool that allows us to remote into the PC's without someone physically being there. Is that a feature with Bomgar?
BRAD PRIZER:
Yes it is. We call it the 'jump' feature. What it does is allow you to gain access to those computers that you would like to have remote access to that are unmanned. That jump feature allows you to do basically the same things you would be doing if someone was there actually working the PC. So, yes we do offer that.
CALLER:
Some really quick questions here, can your product run on a VM session or on a VM server?
BRAD PRIZER:
It depends on the application. Obviously, there are going to be some things that are going to be a little bit unique about everyone's network and their architecture, so I certainly would want to take a look at your environment and how you are operating to make sure we can absolutely say verifiably 'yes it will work in your VM environment'.
CALLER:
Okay. Will it require more than one server if that is the case or just one?
BRAD PRIZER:
Again, it is going to depend on the number of licenses and how many people you are supporting. Because we have different levels of appliances based on, really, the number of people you are trying to support, the number of reps you have sitting on your help desk. The beauty of it is that you can scale up using our appliance. You can scale up as you grow your help desk facility and add more reps. So, that is basically how it operates.
CALLER:
Okay. You guys are fully ITIL compatible.
BRAD PRIZER:
Yes, absolutely.
Related to Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices, what level of support do you target?
Tom is asking here--we must have gone over this. Are you able to leverage remote tools for these devices? We talked about Blackberry devices, Windows Mobile I would assume also, correct?
BRAD PRIZER:
Yes, absolutely.
MITCH BRYANT
We have thousands of devices that are either Windows Mobile or some other OS and we're able to connect to them as long as they are able to get to the Internet. It is a very simple and quick process for them.
RICH HAND:
Very good. What I'm going to do is I'm going to thank you both, but for closing comments I'd love for you guys to just take a moment to sum it up. Either Mitch or Brad. If you start it please give your contact information for those folks who have additional questions.
BRAD PRIZER:
Sure. It really was our pleasure to be part of this today. I really appreciate everybody's questions and interest. We are very excited to be able to work with HDI and tell about, really, the unique product that we offer with Bomgar and it really is an enterprise remote support solution that can be used for almost any application. So, we welcome your inquiries and here is my e-mail address, if you have some specific questions that I can help pass along to our organization. It's bprizer@bomgar.com. Feel free to send me an e-mail.
RICH HAND:
Thank you Brad and I really appreciate you guys supporting the HDI membership by helping us to bring these to our membership. Mitch, a couple of last words?
MITCH BRYANT:
Also, thank you very much for this opportunity. It was a long road for us working with several potential vendor solutions. We were head strong and not going to go spend any money and we found out that we spent more money in time than we needed. We needed to have a secure connection. We needed to make sure that when we left nothing was left behind. We were very concerned about lowering our talk times, making sure that we were HIPPA complaint and obviously the cost of the overall solution and we found that through a lot of looking, a lot of comparison, a lot of proof of concepts this was overwhelmingly voted 100% by our support staff, which was very important for me because if they like it, they will use it and we had several solutions in here that for the first couple of weeks it was okay and then we're not using it. It has been a wonderful tool for us and it has been almost little or no maintenance for us to worry about, so that was an additional benefit. Again, our process proved itself when we had two back-to-back storms as well as we started picking off pieces and parts, like the timeshare PC's and always having to send someone out there. Now we're at about 90% resolution rate on those time share PC's. I think the overall features and the security and the cost of our solution was what drove us here.
RICH HAND:
Mitch, I want to thank you particularly for all you do for HDI as well as your up coming focus books, so keep an eye out for that folks--Mitch's up coming focus books coming out. I want to thank both of you for sharing this because in these difficult economic times all these types of solutions are going to be helpful and I appreciate seeing this both from the company organization, vendor perspective as well as the testimonial from the practitioner to help guide our folks into making good decisions out there to help them reduce their costs. You guys did a great job. Thank you very much. We appreciate it and thank you everybody for joining us today. We will see you in April at the next webinar. We actually have a service management webinar on Thursday as well, so we hope you'll join us there. That will end today's HDI SPIN webinar. Thank you.