By Aaron Lester
To be honest, we know exactly who needs to hear this. You do. You’re an IT leader who has a lot on your plate right now, especially with ongoing uncertainty around remote work and social distancing, and their impact on IT. And we know that a lot of people are looking to you for answers.
We know what keeps you up at night and working hard all day. You face enormous pressure to create operating efficiencies and reduce IT costs. Your users expect their issues to get resolved quickly. To further complicate matters, your internal IT teams are supporting a wide range of systems and devices, including mobile phones and tablets (some of them personal devices in home environments). We feel your pain . . .
Rescue is Needed
IT is the heart of every organization, keeping everything running smoothly. IT support enables efficient workflows and more productive employees. We know that increasing first contact resolution (FCR), reduction in average handle time (AHT), and a reduction in escalations are all at the top of your to-do list. You need a remote support platform designed to resolve the key challenges associated with remote support both internally (to employees) and externally (to customers).
Rescue has developed a set of step-by-step videos (plus additional resources) specifically designed to help organizations like yours get started with remote support and stand up a remote IT help desk. If you’ve already started with virtual IT, these resources can help you fill in remaining gaps. Wherever you are in your journey, here are 4 key steps to success in remote support:
Step #1: Overcome Early Challenges
Transitioning from a partially remote workforce to a fully remote one requires a lot of scrambling, flexibility, and patience on all sides. Chris Handley, product manager for Rescue, says that “when you make that transition to a fully remote workforce, IT and the help desk have to adapt and scale the infrastructure of hardware, software, security, and support, ensuring that you can handle the additional load.” That means standing up the capacity to deploy and scale assets that were once centralized in an office environment to home environments that are generally more complex and uncertain.
Security is especially critical for remote support at a time when malicious activities have increased. Rescue is architected with security as the most important design objective. Core security features include: 256-bit encryption for all communications, permission based model, granular technician privilege management, identity management integration, and multi-factor authentication.
Step #2: Support Uncharted Employee Needs
When you move a computer from the office to home, the environment changes. IT teams “need to quickly understand the entire environment that employees and customers are working in and figure out how to support them,” says Handley. Keeping employees supported, no matter their working environment and needs, also means keeping them productive, which is mission-critical.
Help desks need to be flexible enough with their tools and processes to adapt to how they provide support to how employees and users are working from complex home environments. Visual engagement technology like instant camera sharing, for example, has emerged as a truly helpful, fast, and effective way to bridge the physical distance gap between users and the help desk.
Step #3: Arm IT Teams with Superpowers
While employees working in the office would once have simply walked down the hallway to seek IT help, that option is no longer available in the context of remote work. IT needs remote “superpowers” to support remote working at scale. With scripting, for example, IT teams can resolve one employee issue and then standardize and scale that resolution across the entire (remote) organization. Those “superpowers” often mean working smarter through enabling technologies such as automation, AI, and machine learning.
“The rate of technological change is happening now faster than ever,” says Anderson Dinga, Senior Manager, OCIO Change Readiness at LogMeIn, “with the use of AI and machine learning increasing. We need to support new technologies as we support the productivity of remote users.”
Step #4: Stay Connected to Employees
Organizations need flexibility in allowing users to connect with IT in frictionless ways that are familiar and intuitive for users and IT alike. As Dinga explains, “trends like cloud and mobile are impacting how we deliver support and how users expect to access support. There’s been a consumerization trend.” Both employees and IT teams need seamless, user-friendly tools for interacting in order to resolve remote work issues that can disrupt employee productivity.
“The flexibility that Rescue provides to connect employees and IT teams has become really important for organizations in adapting to the new normal of a fully remote workforce,” says Handley, enabling IT teams to standardize and scale remote support.
A Final Word
We understand the challenges you face as an IT leader and are here to help. Rescue was built to provide remote support that is smart, fast, and simple. Our out-of-the-box integrations, open APIs and mobile SDKs allow for a complete end-to-end support solution across any device, channel and platform. Rescue feeds data from disparate systems into an intuitive agent interface, presenting contextually relevant information in a concise manner and eliminating the need to toggle between multiple systems. Our solution empowers your people to resolve problems quicker and easier, which leads to more effective workflows and more efficient employees. That’s a win for everyone.
