Five Ways to Ensure Your Remote Support Sessions Are Successful

Remote support sessions provide managed services providers (MSPs) with a crucial opportunity to impress their customers. The vast majority of consumers will agree customer service and access to sufficient support are deciding factors in their choice of service provider. This is especially important to customers receiving IT services, which likely play a critical role in keeping their day-to-day business operations running smoothly.

For MSPs, delivering successful remote assistance can be the difference between gaining a customer’s trust and losing them to a competitor—but how can your MSP ensure that a remote support session is successful? This article will aim to provide you with five ways you can improve your remote support sessions to ensure they’re successful for both your team and your customers.

1. Improving user communications

Ensuring strong and easy communication between your support team and your customers is an essential part of delivering a successful remote support session. To improve user communications, start by identifying potential areas of weakness in how you currently communicate with your customers. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Can users contact you quickly? For many customers, their critical business operations depend on the availability of your IT services when they need them. They’re likely to evaluate your service based on how quickly you respond to their technical issues, and thus it’s crucial that customers are able to establish contact as quickly as possible.
• Can users contact you outside of normal business hours? Many of your customers may work remotely or in a different time zone, which means they might need support outside of usual working hours. You can improve user communications by making a form of support available on a 24/7 basis.
• Are your team members friendly and approachable? Although solving your customers’ issues should be the main goal of a remote support session, making your clients feel heard as they express their frustrations is also important. Friendliness is a key component of all good customer service that shouldn’t be overlooked.
• Do your customers have multiple options for how they’d like to contact your support team? Ideally, a customer should be able to reach out to your team in a variety of ways, depending on their issue and what’s most convenient for them. Options might include submitting support tickets via a web-based platform or helpdesk, sending an email, or calling a support line. A mobile application for remote support is also useful, allowing clients to submit tickets at their convenience from their mobile device.

2. Implement automated scripting

Automated scripting allows for the automatic performance of updates and changes to settings, even outside of normal working hours. This means you can schedule scripts and use tools to handle any necessary tasks around the clock, increasing the productivity of your technicians.

Implementing automated scripting into your operations can also make remote support sessions significantly more efficient and productive. Automated scripting can save your team time that they’d otherwise spend manually performing updates and implementing small modifications. This frees up more time for them to spend directly supporting customers, which will inevitably help improve customer service and remote support.

Automated scripting can even trigger actions based on certain events related to remote support. For example, if someone sends in an email with a remote support request, an automatic script could help immediately turn that into a ticket that gets added to the helpdesk queue for a technician to take care of. This helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks while also making the entire support process more efficient.

3. Offer a great command line experience

Offering a good command line experience is a key way of making your remote support sessions more successful. For experienced support technicians, the graphic user interface may actually slow them down and make it harder to diagnose the problem—which is why the command line is important. The commend line is an excellent utility for advance troubleshooting, and you can use it for (much) more than diagnosing and remediating network issues.

4. Gather continuous customer feedback

As with all successful customer service, gathering feedback is essential. It’s important to receive your feedback from a wide range of customers, so you can draw accurate and informed conclusions. It’s best to get feedback when the remote support session is still fresh in the customer’s mind to ensure it’s reliable.

One way of gathering feedback is through post-session surveys, which you should send immediately after a remote support session closes. These surveys should be quick and easy to fill out, thereby encouraging as many customers as possible to submit feedback. This allows your team to continue improving and directly adjust behavior as necessary based on customer thoughts.

If customers don’t have much feedback, you can also improve the quality of service by observing and gathering your own notes on how technicians can improve. Recording sessions will allow you to control quality, and session reports may capture actions to help you get a sense of how your technicians currently hande issues.

5. Use the right tools

The success of a remote support session depends on many factors, such as security, availability, help desk capabilities, and more. Fortunately, there are tools available to assist you in making every aspect of your remote support sessions a success.

Remote support sessions with SolarWinds Take Control

SolarWinds^® Take Control is a remote support tool designed for MSPs to serve their customers with ease. This solution enables both attended and unattended support needs and was built with security in mind. The advanced encryption methods used in Take Control include Elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman and AES 256. To strengthen data security further, Take Control includes multi-level authentication, two-factor authentication, and session-specific PIN generation.

By enabling you to view your customers’ multi-monitor screens in 24-bit true color, Take Control delivers unrivaled visibility as you troubleshoot. This remote assistance solution was built to support both your team and your customers, allowing you to connect in seconds and offering multiple deep diagnostic tools to resolve issues quickly and professionally. Take Control provides your customers with plenty of ways to establish contact with you, including a mobile application so they can submit a support ticket from anywhere.

To make sure every remote support session you undertake is a success, Take Control facilitates automated scripting, feedback gathering, post-session surveys, and improved user communications. A 14-day free trial is available for MSPs ready to deliver powerful remote support.