The Covid 19 pandemic has compelled businesses to adopt remote IT services on a large scale. It has helped organizations meet the IT needs of remote working employees effectively. Remote IT services involve IT technicians leveraging remote support software to access PCs or laptops to troubleshoot issues remotely.
Technicians take control over devices to resolve day-to-day operational issues and carry out monthly maintenance services to ensure minimal device downtime.
Importance of Remote IT Services During Covid 19
Initially, enterprises had mulled over a negative impact on employee productivity because of remote working conditions. To their surprise, productivity for most of the enterprises had skyrocketed. A recent Stanford University study stated that 16,000 workers had their productivity increase by 13% over a period of 9 months of working from home. A lion’s share of this productivity is credited to remote tech support.
Remote tech service providers have taken the pandemic situation to their stride and have overhauled their technology and resources. This allowed them to provide cutting-edge on-demand service while maintaining social distancing norms during the pandemic.
To keep smooth communication and enable seamless resource sharing, employees’ laptops were installed with updated team messaging, file sharing, and communication applications. Remote tech support played a vital role in maintaining network infrastructure that kept these apps up and running.
Things to Consider Before Choosing Remote IT Services
As organizations adopt a hybrid working model, remote tech support will continue to wield its importance in workplace. However, before jumping into the bandwagon, here’s a look at factors that enterprises must consider.
Nature of Usage
There are two ways enterprises use remote tech support. One way is service availed by internal IT team to address IT issues faced by employees. This is relevant for large offices in particular where it is not possible for IT staffs to visit employees at their desks to solve an issue.
The other way is employees using remote support software to take control over customers’ devices and troubleshoot issues remotely. This external use of tech support eliminates the need of giving instructions to technologically naïve users over a phone and prolong the resolution time.
Enterprises must choose remote tech services based on these two usages.
Platform Support
In case enterprises chose remote tech support for internal usage, then they must be mindful about the fact that the remote support tool is compatible to the operating system that employees use on their system.
In case of an external usage, remote support tool should be compatible across multiple operating systems such as iOS, Windows, Mac, Android, and others. Capabilities Beyond Conventional Features Remote screen sharing, file sharing, and remote control are the common capabilities of a remote IT tool. However, at times, issues can be complex that will require remote tech tool function beyond its conventional capabilities.
Users are often unable to properly articulate their issue. Their lack of knowledge on technical jargon adds to this issue and makes the job difficult for remote tech support personnel. In such cases, tools should be upgraded with quick diagnostics feature. This helps remote support tool relay the issue directly to the support agent.
Remote tech tools can be upgraded with automated response feature. This comes handy in case of common issues. Such a feature issues an automated resolution to the issue without an actual agent intervening.
Data Security
Before partnering with remote IT service providers, enterprise must ascertain their ability to protect user data. Service providers must also provide their client full control over the remote connection process. Remote support tools should be aligned to enterprises’ compliance framework.
Instead of relying on website information, enterprises must go through service providers’ history with their clientele. This history can be accessed from relevant industry forums. IT must include every detail about any data security incident that service providers had encountered and how they dealt with them.
Enterprises must ensure that remote tech support agents use a secured network of geographically distributed servers. This keeps remote connection secured and stable.
Upkeeping Tools
Manual upkeeping of remote support tools entail operational overheads. Service providers compensate for these overheads by shooting their remote IT support charge. Therefore, enterprise must partner with service providers who use cloud-based tools. These tools are automatically updated, bugs are fixed in cloud, and do not entail any hidden charges.
Value for Money
Enterprises should agree on service packages that bundle in services that are typically needed to resolve complex as well as non-complex issues. It must include features that allow IT staff to provide miscellaneous support to users.
For instance, package should cover unattended and attended support, secure, stable, and fast connections, troubleshooting and diagnostic tools, live chat options, among some. These features should easily integrate with other tools to allow technicians create dashboards for patch management, endpoint detection, and response.
Conclusion
Enterprises must consider outsourcing remote IT services if they lack resources and the required technical acumen. Otherwise, investing on remote IT support tool and then educating the existing IT team on how to use the tool will add to enterprises’ operational overheads. This will create an additional burden on IT team who will struggle to keep up to this new responsibility as well as their daily disposition. A third-party vendor can assess enterprises’ needs and technical infrastructure and advise remote support solutions that befit their needs and budget.
