What’s the problem with Remote Technical Support from India?

What’s the problem with Remote Technical Support from India?

After close to 8 years in the ITES/BPO industry in india, a small initiative called TechNation (India) was formed, to provide remote technical support, remote online training, online PC repair, web content and article writing and a host of other services.

This article is all about what prompted an employee to break off and start something like this? This is an academic discussion.

In their efforts to survive, the MNCs (Multi-National Companies) started looking for ways and means to survive and cut costs and off-shoring was the answer to many of them. Most of these companies have huge, plush offices in India, which is good but what they do inside these offices is not. They do not realize that what they do not only affects the careers of those who work for them, it also affects the quality of service that is provided to their customers, who pay for these services with their hard-earned money.

This is what they do:
Hire untrained, incompetent staff and put them on the job to “just answer the calls & transfer them to on-site support”.
Do not provide adequate training to their staff because they “do not have sufficient bandwidth” to provide training. The result: pathetic customer service or tech support.
Do not hire sufficient numbers of staff as promised to their customers, just to cut costs. (Of course their clients are shown big numbers – from other teams, who go about their jobs as soon as the client visit is over!) The result – you have an under-sized team answering back to back calls with no time to even get a 10 minute break, during a 9 hour shift! When someone works in such conditions, they get frustrated and angry and this is shown to the customers.
Offer jobs with great designations and high salaries. But the actual job is a far cry away from the designations. For example, a guy providing front-line desktop tech support goes by the designation of “system adminstrator” or “senior system administrator”!
While on one hand there are those who work with no time even for a small break, there are others who go to work and spend the day waching movies and playing indoor games – because there’s no work to do. But of course, they got their salaries on time!This was even at a time when people in other parts of the world were losing their jobs and were struggling to to make ends meet.

Having said that, I must add, there are still some companies who give great importance to delivering quality services. But sadly, such companies are too few. There are a number of well trained, highly skilled and highly educated people in India, but if they land up in a company that does not have the right approach, they end up messing up their careers. I can only hope that more and more of these companies start giving important to quality and right practices and start providing high-quality services to their customers. After all, it is only the customer who keeps the company alive! Just because you are a “big” company does not mean you can provide bad service or treat your customers like dirt.

TechNation (India) is an initiative to prove that you do not need to be a “big” company to leverage knowledge, adopt best practices & of course, provide good services.

Source:- onlinetechnicalsupport.biz

Remote Tech Support: The Power Behind the Scenes

If you’re a small business looking for computer technical support, your first thought is probably to find a company that offers on-site service. Think twice, though. If a technician has to come out, it means you’ll wait. And you’ll also pay for travel time. Remote support from a service provider – a good one – may be a better bet. Faster service, better technicians, lower fees. And most IT problems don’t require an on-site visit.

When vetting remote service providers, ask what kind of tools they use to manage their agents and the interaction between you and the agent. If the company uses market-leading GoToAssist from Citrix Corp ., a hosted service that lets agents log on to your system remotely to trouble shoot, you’re probably on to a good thing. And if you’re a slightly bigger small business setting up its own internal remote help desk, GoToAssist should definitely be on your list of tools to consider using.

The fact that PlumChoice Online PC Services has used GoToAssist since launching five years ago is a good indicator of the product’s strength. PlumChoice is one of the premiere providers of remote technical support to consumers, home office users and small businesses. “The Citrix tool has been a cornerstone of our business,” said Ted Werth, the company's founder and CEO.

Silent Collaboration
The latest version of GoToAssist, 8.0, which PlumChoice began using in January as a beta tester (it was launched in April), adds crucial new functionality, including a silent collaboration feature. It allows an agent to call a more knowledgeable technician into a support session to help solve a problem. The two agents converse using instant messaging-style chat. The customer is unaware of this side conversation.

PlumChoice, a leading provider of remote technical support, relies on GoToAssist 8.0 to get the job done.

It reduces the need to escalate calls, which is time consuming and irritates customers, and increases the first-time fix rate – the percentage of first calls to a contact center that result in complete resolution of a customer’s problem. This is a key metric for technical support services and help desks because solving problems on the first call drives up customer satisfaction and reduces costly call-backs. The new GoToAssist contributed to PlumChoice increasing its first-time fix rate to 94 percent this year, up from 80 percent last year.

There is no question about PlumChoice’s success and its stature in the industry. It has 100,000 customers, served by a staff of 200 agents. Some of those customers come to PlumChoice on their own. The company’s Web site offers “retail” remote support products, such as monthly PC support, PC Tuneup, PC Optimization and Spyware and Virus Removal, as well as help setting up consumer technology products such as MP3 players and digital cameras.

Many of PlumChoice’s customers are customers of big software, Internet service and retail partners that co-market its services. Partners include CA(Computer Associates), a major software and IT services company, retailer Circuit City and ISPs Earthlink and Comcast.

SMB Support Services
PlumChoice also offers small business technical support – subscription remote support services, a security package, online backup – as well as remote training, including instruction on using new features and functions in Windows Vista and Microsoft Office. “The use of Citrix has been critical for us in building solutions for small businesses,” Werth says. Having an agent/trainer logged in to the customer’s system makes training, in particular, much more effective, said Rich Surace, PlumChoice vice president of operations.

GoToAssist, a software as a service (SaaS) offering, provides all the back-end functionality for managing technicians online, including adding new agents when call traffic dictates, monitoring activity levels, listening to agents’ sessions, capturing performance metrics and even correlating customer satisfaction survey results to individual agents and types of calls. GoToAssist initiates random customer survey sessions immediately after calls, with Citrix collating and reporting the results.

The product functions in many ways like a call center automatic call distributor (ACD), but offers some sophisticated routing and work scheduling options that no ACD can provide. Small business customers especially frequently ask PlumChoice to respond to a number of issues or to perform a number of services on one call. GoToAssist allows the company to split the work among multiple agents. The first agent might respond to a technical problem, while PlumChoice re-routes another task – running a virus scan on the customer’s system, for example – to a different agent to be worked on concurrently.

The customer isn’t aware of this task sharing. It just means the work gets done faster. The second (or third) task could even be routed to an agent outside the country. While some PlumChoice employees work in a central facility, many are virtual agents, working from home. GoToAssist makes it easy to manage this kind of work flow, Surace said.

Another key differentiator is that the Citrix product records every customer support session, both the audio portion and the “video” – the screens the agent and customer went through together. “That’s crucial,” said Surace. “We need to be able to go back and see what was done on each session.”

Remote but Secure
The product also lets agents log on to a customer’s computer remotely over the Internet to trouble shot and make changes. Remote connectivity is available with other products and services, including Windows operating systems, but GoToAssist makes it seamless and transparent – and more palatable – to customers, Werth said. For one thing, they don’t have to download and install software on their system as some other remote connectivity products require.

“One of the main concerns customers have before they let somebody log on to their system is obviously security,” Werth said. “The strong encryption that GoToAssist uses gives our customers peace of mind that nobody [on the Internet] can [intercept and] eavesdrop on their session. The customer also has the ability to boot our agent off the system at any time. That gives them additional peace of mind because they know they’re in control.”

The new silent collaboration feature in GoToAssist 8.0 is a huge benefit to a tech support operation as customer satisfaction-centered as his, Werth said. PlumChoice agents can call for assistance if they run into problems they can’t solve – if they encounter an unfamiliar virus or trojan on a customer’s system while helping them with a simple task such as setting up a new MP3 player, for example. But the company also uses the feature proactively. If a session goes beyond a certain time threshold, a possible indication the agent is having problems, a supervisor will come on the call – unknown to the customer – and provide mentoring.

“GoToAssist has really helped us both grow our business and manage the quality of the service we provide,” Werth said.

Best in Class
When PlumChoice went looking for a tool to build its business around five years ago, there weren’t many options available. There were products such as pcAnywhere, still available from Symantec , that allow a technician to log on to a customer’s system remotely, but they were all single-point-to-single-point solutions and provided only the remote connectivity. GoToAssist manages many simultaneous remote sessions for subscribers like PlumChoice and does it seamlessly, Surace said. Plus it provides all the back-end contact center management functions.

The fact that GoToAssist is a hosted service, that PlumChoice doesn’t have to manage software or install servers was another major plus. The company first implemented the solution when it was owned and marketed by Expertcity Inc., which Citrix acquired in 2003. Since then, PlumChoice and the Citrix product have evolved together. “They have always taken our feedback and often acted on it,” Surace said. “Version 8.0 is pretty much a [collaborative] effort [between PlumChoice and Citrix].”

The icing on the cake? The GoToAssist service is ultra-reliable – rock solid, in fact, Surace said. “I think it’s been down once in the four or five years we’ve been using it. And that was for ten minutes. When you can rely on a product 24 by seven, that’s huge.”

Source :-smallbusinesscomputing.com

Remote Tech Support - Long Distance Healing

What do you when your PC is out of its warranty period? Where do you resort when you have no technicians around to help you fix your computer?

There are a lot of solutions to that but the most popular is the Remote Tech Support Services. These are people who fix your computer problems off-site. It means that instead of them repairing your computer, it is actually you. All you need to do is call their technical support contact number and relay all the issues concerning your computer to them. Some remote tech support services are through email and chat as well.

Some people would ask if this kind of procedure is useful and not serve as a hassle to the computer user. In my opinion it is not. I myself have worked in the past as a technical support representative and later on promoted as a helpdesk support. There are times that people would call at midnight or the wee hours in the morning where one could not avail the services of a technician personally. You might be in the middle of something important when your internet connection got cut. It is not enough to use the Windows Help to assist you in troubleshooting your computer on your own.

On the technical support's side, they have tools such as a simulator to be able to see exactly what is happening when you do the instructions given to you. They also have softwares that can access your computer remotely and be able to see what you are doing on your own screens. This is very useful since as you are doing your own troubleshooting with the guide of the technician, you will be as well learning how to repair your PC on your own in case the same problem happens again.

On the other hand, in case the problem is out of the technical support's scope of work, you will still be opted to consult the manufacturer side to be able to know and dig deeper into the PC's problem. This is normal for internet connectivity issues. At first, you call your internet service provider and later on, you will find out that the root of the problem is with the PC itself. Some people find this frustrating since it is very difficult to reach a support representative right away. But it is not the case at all times, there are tech support companies who provide high touch customer experience where you can speak to a live person in less than 60 seconds every time you call them.

In any case, whenever you feel like you are in need of a remote support to help you, keep in mind that it is very important that you take notes of every little step that you do. Again, this will help in providing you with a crash course in fixing your computer. As the saying goes, two birds in one shot. You get to fix your computer and you acquire self-education.

Source: http://goo.gl/j9RfA