WebEx Support Center: The Fix is In

Businesses the world over have gratefully removed the physical boundaries to collaboration by leveraging on-demand Web conferencing applications from Santa Clara, Calif.-based WebEx Communications Inc. For technical support organizations struggling to support increasingly distributed and remote workforces and an ever-growing set of mission-critical applications, WebEx extends those collaborative benefits through Support Center, its on-demand remote support and collaboration offering.

“Remote support is the most powerful story in service and support,” says Jack Chawla, director, product management at WebEx. Whether a support organization is providing business-to-business technical support to a relatively small number of extremely valuable customers, or business-to-consumer support to hundreds of thousands of consumers, or help desk services to employees scattered across regional offices or out on the road, the prevailing dilemma is the same: It’s extremely expensive, if not impossible, to deliver onsite support, yet problems are typically too complex to be solved simply by exchanging information over the phone. With its sophisticated, IP-based remote support capabilities, Support Center enables technical support representatives (TSRs) to replicate an onsite visit by allowing them to remotely diagnose, control and provide fixes to a user’s desktop, regardless of the platform they’re using.

Thanks to offerings like Support Center, remote support is finally getting the attention that analysts have been predicting for years. While remote support tools have been touted for some time for their ability to dramatically improve resolution times without onsite visits — thereby dramatically reducing support costs and increasing time to productivity — their adoption has been hindered, say analysts, by network security concerns and bandwidth issues. As network performance improves through high-speed connections and users get more comfortable with the security of online transactions, the remote support market — though still handling a relatively small percentage of transactions — is poised for growth, according to Tom Sweeney, principal at ServiceXRG, a Boston-based analyst firm. The greatest traction for remote support has been in the B2C segment, he says, due both to the fact that remote control engine clients are often shipped on desktop machines and that bandwidth delivery to home-based users has improved significantly.

For its part, WebEx directly addresses many of the concerns that have led to past dissatisfaction and suspicion with remote support models. WebEx offers Support Center as an on-demand service rather than requiring installed software, hosting all its customers on a common, secure infrastructure based on its global MediaTone Network. The IP-based network platform — the third generation of which WebEx just released — not only enables highly secure Web-based collaboration through data, voice and video media, but provides unmatched performance and scalability for speedy remote support collaboration and problem resolution, according to Chawla.

“Not only is our service 100% reliable, with global service backup, but with our MediaTone platform, we’re able to remove any latency and improve the performance of remote support delivery throughout the world,” he says.

Further, says Chawla, Support Center doesn’t require the installation of resource-intensive client software; users seeking support from an agent need only download a small client for the actual session if one isn’t already resident on the desktop. Meanwhile, they can take advantage of any Internet browser they choose for the session. After connecting with a contact center or help desk via phone or chat, users give TSRs permission to browse their desktop and in some cases, to take complete control to enact a fix. Depending on the problem, TSRs can take whatever action is needed — transfer files with patches or updates or install new applications, for example. If escalation is necessary, TSRs can bring in subject-matter experts from within or outside their organization for collaboration purposes, or package the results of a support session to pass on to a higher-tier support professional, obviating the need for that person to repeat steps already taken. Support Center also features recording and editing capabilities, so that support sessions can be captured for knowledgebase transfer, training purposes, and more.

Not only does remote support greatly improve first-call resolution, but it provides the opportunity to practice ever-critical call deflection, says Chawla. Taking advantage of a customer’s or employee’s satisfaction following problem resolution, TSRs can use the opportunity to market a support organization’s less-expensive self-service options, so they can be explored first should a user encounter future problems.

“The remote support session is an opportunity to not only quickly resolve a problem, but to promote self-service channels, which provide a great cost-savings to the company,” says Chawla.

One WebEx customer, enterprise applications provider Lawson Software, estimates that its Global Support Center (GSC) has saved around $600,000 in technical support costs by using Support Center to deliver remote B2B support to customers. Not only has Lawson seen an ROI approaching 700% since it deployed Support Center in 2000, according to executives, but the company has greatly improved the satisfaction levels of its customers, who had previously dealt with lengthy resolution cycles stemming from the GSC’s attempts to fix extremely complex technical problems over the phone.

Prior to the Support Center deployment, the average time to resolution for a complex support call — of which Lawson was receiving 1,000 per month — was two hours, meaning that the GSC was spending 2,000 agent hours per month trying to talk through problems with customers, as they had no visibility into remote systems. A dial-up access solution designed to complement phone sessions proved inefficient. Following a technology review process, Lawson chose WebEx’s solution based on its ability to integrate with its existing front-office applications and processes, as well as to enable assisted, remote support and include additional TSRs in collaborative sessions should escalation need to occur. Another key factor in the decision was Support Center’s hosted service delivery model.

Lawson completed a full rollout of Support Center in 2001, and was handling 1,200 sessions per month using the tools by the end of 2002. According to executives, use of the product has helped the GSC to reduce average handle times by 25%, resulting in the significant savings they’re seeing.

While WebEx’s Support Center customers have been primarily companies in the B2B space, particularly high-tech companies delivering external support, Chawla says the product is starting to gain traction in enterprise help desks as well. Though adequate budgeting is and will continue to be a problem for IT help desks, support professionals face mounting pressures to address the increasingly changing composition of the enterprise workforce.

“For IT departments, support is beginning to resemble B2B technical support, where the business is supporting several different customers without regard to physical boundaries. First, more workers are dispersed throughout remote offices, with little or no IT support onsite, and second, more and more workers are mobile, and it’s difficult to have to rely on a corporate VPN for support,” says Chawla.

Further, he says, the number of applications that are critical to business operations — and that IT is charged with supporting — is rapidly growing. “It used to be that a company had one or two mission-critical applications that needed supporting. Now there are often hundreds and each needs to have a certain service level. That has IT saying, ‘we really need a remote support solution that will work no matter where our employees are,’” Chawla says.

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