Archive for the ‘Training & Guides’ Category

The SupportIndustry.com Leadership Webinars Series

October 7, 2011

Rich Gallagher

How to Hire, Lead and Motivate Your All-Star Support Team

In this three-part webinar series, industry expert Rich Gallagher will discuss the key (and often unspoken) steps to successfully hiring, leading and motivating your team of support professionals. Rich presents a creative and highly effective process that will dramatically increase your odds of hiring the right person every time.

Rich will also show why support leaders succeed or fail in fast-paced customer contact environments and how you can harness the diverse personalities of your support team for better performance.

Attend this interactive webinar series to learn:
• How to screen, attract and retain top support talent
• How to lead your support teams
• Team building in a support center
Registering for one or all of the events is easy – see below for detailed information on each of these webinars.
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Webinar Part I: Hiring for Great Service: How to Screen, Attract and Retain Top Support Talent
Thursday, October 13, 2011 – 11 AM (PT) / 2 PM (ET)

How do you select top support professionals and avoid hiring mistakes – and, more important, how do you create a repeatable process that consistently chooses the best people?

Join SupportIndustry.com as we present a creative and highly effective process that will dramatically increase your odds of hiring the right person every time.

Attend this interactive webinar to learn:
• How to implement a team interview process
• Creative ways to assess problem-solving skills and attitude
• How to build your “brand” as an employer
• Keys to retention ‒ hiring well and hiring less

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Webinar Part II: Leading Support Teams: The Mechanics

Thursday, November 3, 2011 – 11 AM (PT) / 2 PM (ET)

If you lead a support team, your day-to-day practices as a leader are likely to have the single biggest impact on the morale, turnover and performance of your support team.

Join SupportIndustry.com as we share the many important and, at times, surprising ways that support leaders succeed or fail in fast-paced customer contact environments.

Attend this interactive webinar to learn:
• Good metrics, bad metrics – how to measure performance
• How to make your team part of a greater whole
• Training that works – creating an environment for collaboration & learning
• Benefits of leadership on the team level

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Webinar Part III: Your Cast of Characters: Team Building in a Support Center

Thursday, December 8, 2011 – 11 AM (PT) / 2 PM (ET)

Your support team is like a family – in every good and bad sense of the word! And understanding its “family” dynamics is often the hidden key to reducing conflict and improving performance.

Join SupportIndustry.com as we present how to understand the interpersonal forces that drive your support team and how to harness its diverse personalities for better performance.

Attend this interactive webinar to learn:
• How conflicts arise and how to short circuit them
• Front line/back line relationships
• How to speak everyone’s “language”
• Tips and traps for managing different personalities

Remoting with the Folks — Useful Tools

September 2, 2011

Conquering the tech generation gap. Photo courtesy of Ollie Crafoord at flickr.

By Niklas Edlinger

I’ve recently made a pretty useful remote support discovery. Despite the fact that my elderly parents are eager to join the computer world (hello Facebook), they aren’t quite the best at navigating computer problems when they arise.

In the past, I’ve tried talking them through issues over the phone (or worse yet, email), which as anyone who has tried knows, is no easy feat.

“My Word has an extra page I can’t get rid of.”

“Have you tried scrolling as far down as you can and then holding backspace?”

“Of course I’ve tried that – the page is still there!”

And so on. I’m always happy to help when I can, but boy can it be frustrating. That’s when I realized remote support is for more than just professionals. One URL and a couple clicks later, I’m viewing their screen, solving the problem painlessly. It’s almost too convenient – soon they won’t even try to figure it out themselves, and that worries me and my free time.

Reuters just published an article on a group of elderly Japanese who formed their own IT support group, called “Computer Grandmas.” That sounds like a fantastic idea to me. I might have to leave that page open on my parents’ screen the next time I remote in.

Google too recognizes the looming tech knowledge gap between us and our elders. They’ve taken a stab at solving it with these easy self-help videos, and they’ve made it fun to send one to Ma or Pa.

Who knows, maybe someday, my mom will be schooling me in the complexities of IT.

“How to Build a MSP Marketing Machine”

February 22, 2011

Kutenda -- Marketing for MSPs

Hey, here’s a handy-dandy guide to marketing for managed service providers. It’s probably useful for anyone providing IT services. The guide focuses on online and website marketing, and it comes from Kutenda, who make their living out of helping MSPs market their services and grab solid sales leads.

Kutenda says the guide provides the essentials for “creating an automated marketing machine using online marketing.” We think it’s clear and useful.

Among the guide’s useful tips is how to optimize your site for search engines (SEO) and best ways to write your website’s key messages.

Enjoy!

The Magic of Unattended Support — Best Practices for GoToAssist Express Users

February 8, 2011

IT Wizard (Photo courtesy of Linus Bohman, Flickr).

The Unattended Support feature of GoToAssist Express is a powerful, almost magical tool in the hands of support professionals. With this functionality, IT wizards can amaze their customers. They can remotely troubleshoot machines or conduct routine maintenance without requiring the customer’s presence at the supported machine.

But the mysterious magic of Unattended Support may cause your customers to worry over security. What are the best ways to reassure them and build trust? And how can you best use Unattended Support to your advantage and to deliver value to your customers?

To answer these questions, we at Citrix Online have created a user guide of best practices. Gathering tips and insights from IT professionals, help desk managers and consultants, we have compiled this guide to help you get the most out of Unattended Support and our remote support service.

To access the guide in PDF format, click here.

If you have any additional best practices, tips, feedback or wizard’s tricks, please send them to us.

How-To Geek Reviews and Ranks GoToAssist Express

October 4, 2010

Mysticgeek at How-To Geek reviewed our beloved remote support product and gave us 4.5 stars (we’re thrilled).

You can read the full article, his conclusion is below.

“GoToAssist, which is powered by Citrix, and is a dead simple way to support other user’s Mac or PC remotely. The performance is surprisingly fast compared to some other remote assistance software out there. It provides a great toolset that allows you to transfer over needed files like software patches, easy to use chat, easy to find diagnostics, and settings which help increase the speed of your remote session. If you have a lot of people to help at a given time, it allows you unlimited live support with up to 8 sessions at a time.

It makes supporting computers much easier than trying to figure out what users are saying over the phone. You can dial in to see and control what is happening and explain what you’re doing, or start an unattended session and just fix the problem.”

Setup an Unattended Session on Fastsupport.com in under 2 minutes!

May 26, 2010

I’ve been looking at a ton of user comments from surveys, UserVoice, etc… and I decided to address an issue that seems to be showing up rather frequently. Many of you might not even be aware that the feature exists. So here it is, a very quick and easy way to setup unattended support when you are on-site, physically at the target machine. Along with the written steps, please take a look at my quick instructional video. I created it using GoView, another great product from Citrix Online.

    Follow these simple steps:

  • Go to following URL: https://www.fastsupport.com/unattended
  • Click on “Set Up Unattended Support”
  • You will be prompted to login to your GoToAssist account
    • Enter your GoToAssist username and password
  • You will be prompted to enter your system username and password
    • (e.g. Domain Admin, Local Admin, Local User Account with install rights, etc.)
  • You will be prompted to enter the following information
    • Computer nickname (e.g. Bob’s Office Computer)
    • Access Code (Unique to this machine)

That’s It. Your Computer will now show up in your Unattended Machines list!

Click on icon below to watch a step by step presentation of the steps outlined above:

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Webinar – IT without Borders: Supporting beyond Corporate Walls

January 26, 2010

These are transformative times for the workplace. Worker mobility is on the rise. And whether mobility is offered as an employee benefit or required during unexpected workplace disruptions, the IT help desk must effectively support employees — regardless of location.

Join us for an interactive Webinar to hear Sean Ryan, IDC research analyst, explore today’s workplace terrain and detail why organizations need to extend IT support beyond the four walls of the corporate office.

Attend this interactive Webinar to learn:

  • Why today’s business culture is creating an increasingly mobile workforce and what that means for the IT help desk
  • Key challenges presented by employee mobility and platform variety
  • How to select the right tool to effectively provide remote support, while reducing costs, optimizing efficiency and leveraging expertise
  • And more…

Date: January 28, 2010
Time: 11am Pacific, 12pm Mountain, 1pm Central, 2pm Eastern

Note: If you can’t attend the live webinar, you can still sign up to view the recorded version on demand. Just click the regisration button above.

New Product, New Beta – Check out GoToTraining Beta

December 17, 2009

It is so nice to be able to share in the giving this holiday season. I’d like to tell you a bit about our newest product, GoToTraining. It is in beta now and it is free to use during the beta. So if you have any training needs beyond your traditional remote support needs, or if you know someone in training, sign up for the beta and give us your feedback. We are expecting GoToTraining 1.0 to launch in early 2010 so now is your chance to check it out for free and provide feedback to our product team.

Here is more info about what you can do with GoToTraining Beta:

  • Invite prospective trainees to register at an Online Course Catalogue.
  • Deliver live interactive trainings to up to 200 attendees.
  • Store training materials online for download.
  • Test your audience before, during or after trainings.

You can sign up here or by clicking on the try it free button below.

Webinar: Leveraging Surveys to Improve Customer Retention

October 5, 2009

Join us for a live Webinar to hear John Ragsdale, VP at The SSPA, share strategies for using surveys to radically improve the customer experience, accurately measure session performance and fortify one of your most important revenue streams.

 Attend this interactive Webinar to learn:

  • Best practices for developing an effective survey strategy
  • How to use survey results to improve first-call resolution and customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • How to leverage customizable surveys to identify new revenue streams
  • And more…

 Register

 

Date: Thursday, October 8
Time: 11AM Pacific, 12pm Mountain, 1pm Central, 2pm Eastern

If you miss this webinar, you can see the recording on-demand by click the register link above.

Webinar: Strategies for Developing a Highly Collaborative Support Environment

September 14, 2009

This Tuesday, September 15 at 10am Pacific time, we are hosting a webinar with the SSPA on using collaboration as part of your remote support environment. Here are the details for from the webinar invite. If you aren’t able to join live, you can still register (before or after the webinar) and an archived webinar link will be sent to you.

Register Here

Web collaboration has emerged from the economic ashes of 2009 as a high-impact support technology with a compelling ROI. And it’s no surprise — the benefits of Web collaboration for technical support include improved service levels, reduced operational costs, effective team communication and enhanced customer experience.

Join us for a live Webinar with John Ragsdale, VP of the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA). Ragsdale will discuss the business and customer value of Web-collaboration tools and share case studies of organizations that are leveraging this technology to thrive in a tough economy.

During this 1-hour interactive Webinar, you’ll learn:

  • The 9 functional modules of Web collaboration
  • How business can use Web collaboration to deliver better customer support
  • Which Web-collaboration modules deliver the fastest ROI
  • And more…

Strategies for Developing a Hightly Collaborative Support Environment

Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Time: 10am Pacific, 11am Mountain, 12pm Central, 1pm Eastern 
Speakers: John Ragsdale, VP of Research, The SSPA and Brenda Dentinger, Product Marketing Manager, Citrix Online

Register

 

 

If you aren’t able to catch the live webinar, you can click the registration link above and view the archived webinar on-demand.


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