Webinar: Contact Center Innovation-What the Future Holds

May 10, 2010 by Brenda Dentinger

Running an effective, profitable customer-support operation is like spinning a stack of plates. One plate is speed of delivery, another one is quality of support and yet another is cost of operations. Each plate is critical to the success of the organization. And a strong metrics program is what keeps all the plates in perfect balance.

Join us for an interactive Webinar with John Ragsdale  of TSIA to learn which qualitative, quantitative and cost metrics to include in a dashboard for customer service or technical support, as well as find out industry averages for key services metrics. Ragsdale will demonstrate how companies are leveraging innovative remote support platforms to create and automate effective dashboards.

Attend this interactive Webinar to learn:

  • Strategies for measuring success and improving service quality
  • Key metrics for 2010
  • How to predict problems before margins are impacted
  • And more…

Date: May 13, 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.

GoToAssist Express Survey Winners

April 26, 2010 by Brenda Dentinger

Whenever I do a survey, I like to learn a little bit more about our customers so I always ask the survey sweepstakes winners a few more questions. As always, the people who use GoToAssist Express for remote support are in varied industries with interesting stories…

Ray Desjardins

Ray is a Chartered Accountant with a specialty in Information Technology (CA.IT) based in a small rural community (St. Paul) in northeast Alberta. His Chartered Accountancy practice has a strong emphasis on supporting his business clients technology needs, including accounting software, operating systems, network and other related issues.

They serve clients throughout Alberta and BC – with a few clients as far away as Japan.  GoToAssist allows them to “hand over hand” our clients as if we were seated beside them at their computers – notwithstanding that we are often in a different time zone than they are. 

What he loves about GoToAssist Express: “We love that we can make significant changes to clients systems (or install software) that may require a reboot without having to re-initiate a new session.  I also love that I can multi-task more than one session at a time and thereby leverage my time.”

 

Victoria Yudin 

Flexible Solutions is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner focused on Dynamics GP in Garwood, NJ. They use GoToAssist Express to provide custotmer technical support.

What she loves about GoToAssist Express: “Being able to send files, how quick it is to get connected to a customer’s computer.”

Rick Kerns

Continuex Corporation creates software for the Long Term Healthcare industry (nursing homes and assisted living facilities).  We have been doing this since 1982 and have customers in 37 states.  We are located in the greater Seattle, WA area.  Their customers call them for support not only with our software but with many situations that occur in their day to day business.  The ability to quickly connect to their computer and see what they are seeing and to take actions that would be complex to explain to them allows us to deliver fast, accurate and quality support. 

“In the past, we have used other connection tools…but GoToAssist Express has been the best of these tools.  The fact that our customers do not have to purchase anything for us to connect to them when using GoToAssist eliminates any resistance from the customer to allow us to directly connect.  The end result is a happy customer with a quick answer to their question.  We even use it for mini-trainings but we also use GoToMeeting for most remote trainings.”

What he loves about GoToAssist Express: “It works each and every time even with some of our customers who are still using, believe it or not, some of our older DOS based software.  Only GoToAssist Express works with these customers.  Our most favorite new feature was the adding of unattended support.  We do quite a bit of after-hours maintenance of our software with our customers and this new feature has made it possible to do this after hours when we don’t have to interrupt their daily activities.  The bottom line is that this tool makes it possible to deliver the high quality support that we are known for and our customers remain happy.  It is hard to even remember how hard it was to do that before GoToAssist.”

 

Jeffrey Holder 

Meyer Trucking provides over the road trucking services, they are based in San Jose, King City and Bakersfield California. Jeffrey used GoToAssist Express to support his remote and mobile users.

What he loves about GoToAssist Express: 

Unattended Support allows me access to remote systems running processes but not necessarily users. (i.e. time clocks and mileage servers), Session notes and reports allow me to determine how much time is spent on each session and any repeating issues. Great product – full featured and simple to use.

Webinar: Cloud Computing: The Evolution of the IT Help Desk

April 21, 2010 by Brenda Dentinger

IT help desks are adopting a mix of innovative, new technologies, such as Software as a Service, virtualization and even strategic outsourcing. And while these new technologies align the IT help desk with business objectives, they also introduce novel internal support challenges.

Join us for an interactive Webinar with Elaina Stergiades, IDC senior research analyst, to discover how IT organizations can better meet the needs of their internal customers.

Attend this live Webinar to learn:

  • The major challenges facing IT departments in 2010
  • How IT staff can better meet the needs of internal customers
  • Best practices for delivering internal support
  • And more…

Date: April 22, 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.

Webinar: Unlocking the Potential of Professional Services and Support

April 14, 2010 by Brenda Dentinger

Locked inside your professional services and support organization is your company’s greatest untapped potential for generating revenue. But what’s the key to creating a strategic advantage in support and service?

Join us for an interactive Webinar with Roger Courville, communications expert and author of The Virtual Presenter’s Handbook, to discover how to turn remote support and service into a powerful competitive differentiator and strategic source of revenue.

Attend this Webinar to learn:

  • How to increase billable utilization of service and support staff
  • Reducing customer effort through first-contact resolution
  • Defining a process to improve availability and utilization for PS and support
  • And more…

Date: April 15, 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.

5 Ways to Get Your Customers (and You) Happy

April 9, 2010 by jessicaeastman

It’s the ongoing dilemma:  How do we increase customer satisfaction while reducing agent burnout?

SupportIndustry.com just released a study to answer that exact question.  With an in-depth survey of support professionals, they indentified five tactics to increase customer satisfaction and agent performance.

The five tactics to happiness include:

  1. Support really does make people happier. Support transactions have a measurable impact on customer frustration levels – close to 85% are frustrated before the transaction, but more than 60% are not frustrated at all afterwards. Likewise, over a third of support operations deliver customer satisfaction levels in excess of 90%, while fewer than 15% deliver less than 80%.
  2. Training helps, but only the right kind. Training has a measurable impact on customer satisfaction levels, but only when (a) you train both supervisors and frontline staff and (b) your training approach includes accurate call simulations and measurable performance objectives. There is also a correlation between the amount of training you do and how satisfied your customers are.
  3. Agents do well – with the right tools. Over 80% of respondents rate their agents as being confident, and the vast majority report good relationships between agents and their managers. The biggest challenges remain access to problem-solving technology, as well as communications and people issues on both the internal and external side.
  4. Performance evaluation is an art and a science. Metrics, customer feedback, and the old standby of what the boss thinks all remain a big part of how agents are evaluated. Session monitoring, surveys, and coaching are less frequently used, showing a trend toward less labor-intensive approaches for performance evaluation.
  5. Remote support is here to stay. The era of blindly troubleshooting customer issues over the telephone has gone the way of the 8-track tape. An overwhelming majority of respondents now use remote support tools, in operations of all sizes, particularly for remote access to customer systems. Other features such as file transfer and remote diagnostics are popular as well, while sites using these tools for live collaboration and escalation remain in the minority.

Get more tips for customer and agent satisfaction by reading the complete paper, “2010 Service and Leadership Trends in Customer Support.”

Happy supporting!

GoToBot Loves GoToAssist

March 31, 2010 by Brenda Dentinger

A friend caught me on video talking about remote support with GoToBot at HDI.

Last Week at HDI

March 26, 2010 by Brenda Dentinger

Help Desk Institute (HDI) held their annual conference last week in Orlando. A team of us attended and worked in our booth in the exhibit hall. It was a busy week and I personally had a lot of fun talking to customers and propsects about clientless remote support. We also had a special visitor from the future, named GoToBot. I really liked GoToBot. He was a clever little guy… sang, danced, made people laugh.

French and German Language Support added to GoToAssist Express

February 26, 2010 by Barry Dacus

French and German versions will be available in the next release of GoToAssist Express. You will be upgraded to this release (build 223) next week.

During a session, users on a Windows PC can use their GoToAssist Preferences to select their preferred language from a list of English, French and German. For Mac users, GoToAssist Express uses English, French or German if it is selected in System Preferences under Language & Text. This language setting will be used the next time the support representative uses GoToAssist Express, even if they use it from another computer.

When a customer visits fastsupport.com and joins a GoToAssist Express session, their language in GoToAssist Express is based upon their browser settings. When a customer joins a session from a GoToAssist Express system tray, dock or desktop icon, this language setting will be used.

If a user’s default language is not yet supported, they will receive the English version of GoToAssist Express by default.

Click here to see a short video of how this works for representatives and customers using GoToAssist Express.

Reporting Changes
• The Customer Name field in the Attended Sessions report is now populated with the customer’s name as supplied at fastsupport.com or within the customer’s application.
• The Unattended Sessions report has a new column titled Computer Name, which is the nickname that the support representative assigned to a computer.

Unattended Support Changes
Support representatives can now change the access code for unattended computers even if they have changed their email address since setting up that unattended computer.

Who Put the Shiny Black Gleam in GoToAssist Express?

February 25, 2010 by Richard Kaplan

Kris Niles, Senior User Experience Designer at Citrix Online

Kris Niles has been on the cutting edge of GoToAssist Express’ development from day one. Kris is a senior user experience designer at Citrix Online and was the lead designer for the user interface of our remote support super tool. So who better to interview as we celebrate the very first anniversary of GoToAssist Express?

Kris created the look and feel of the GoToAssist Express application, from its icons and color palette to its tabs and buttons. He determined the “interaction flows” — the paths that users take as they navigate around GoToAssist Express. Furthermore, Kris remains on top of ongoing design enhancements for GoToAssist Express and is up to his eyeballs researching the customers’ use and experience.

Hi Kris, I know you were involved with GoToAssist Express from the very start. Can you tell me what pushed Citrix Online to build this product?

GoToAssist Express was a product designed for the individual tech support provider. Usually these guys and gals belonged to small companies with two or three tech support reps or maybe they were just individual proprietors who had a tech support business. They might have customers around town or around the state or maybe even around the world, and we found that these people were spending a lot of time traveling to their customers’ houses. They might drive an hour to do a five-minute fix. So we saw a need there for an easier way to do things. GoToAssist Express was really built out of that — a need to really quickly and easily connect to customers and help them with their tech issues.

How did that affect the look and feel of GoToAssist Express?

When we started the design process, we decided to make a user interface that was very streamlined and sleek. Our users are very task oriented, and we wanted a design that receded into the background and lets you simply focus on the task at hand (fixing your customer’s issue!). After several iterations, we decided on our black design – a black frame to the viewing window and a black ribbon toolbar with light blue icons. The result was a design that we feel is subtle, sleek and has a bit of a “techie” feel to it, to convey its purpose and underlying power.

So it’s sleek, understated and functional, kind of like a tool?

Kind of techie, kind of cool and visually appealing.

The interface – "kind of techie, kind of cool"

What were your guiding ideas in designing GoToAssist Express for small businesses and individual tech support providers?

There were a couple of big principles. The first one was it had to be incredibly easy and very fast to get into a session with your customer.

If you were on the phone talking to the customer and they said, “I am really having a problem with my computer. Could you come out and take a look at it?” you could say, “Know what, hang on one second,” and start a support session right there with them on the phone and resolve the issue. Start the app, get the support key, relay it to the customer and then jump into the session in less than 30 seconds. That was one of the biggest things. We said no matter what happens, we want it to be lightening fast to get into a session and get going.

Another big idea was that the app be really screen-sharing focused so the support expert could instantly see the customer’s machine. That was the second most important element. So we designed a minimal user interface so that seeing the customer’s screen is the primary, most important thing.

Another element that we continuously strove for was making it so easy to use that you don’t need to read a manual. … You can just start the app and use it! We really wanted it to be discoverable and intuitive. And we got some really good feedback from customers saying, “I didn’t even bother to read the manual. I just opened and it said here’s the support key — give that to the customer.” And they just click the button and go. That’s 100 percent something we were striving for — ease of use, discoverability, learnability.

I understand that GoToAssist Express was developed with a lot of testing, user feedback and innovation along the way. You’re very focused on the customer experience. How’d the development of our remote-support tool involve customers and their feedback?

Well, an especially innovative thing about GoToAssist Express was the way we rolled out the product as a free beta. So we built it with the basic number of features that people would need and put it out there, saying, “Sign up for free, use it, tell us what you think.” And every time someone would run a session, it would conclude with a feedback form. … We got thousands of pieces of feedback every day. For a year, we kept developing the product and kept building these new features, while customers were using it. They got the benefit of using it for free, and we got the benefit of their great feedback.

And we are still constantly getting feedback from our users and striving to make our product better. We’ve a feedback email link (feedback@gotoassistexpress.com), a user forum on our Web site and a feedback forum where users can suggest and vote for new GoToAssist features.

So the GoToAssist Express interface didn’t just develop out of a master plan in your head but instead depended on our users?

It’s become very much a collaborative effort. We reach out to our customers a lot and ask them “how would you design this feature?” It’s great to put users in the role of designer. We are working together to ultimately make a product that really works well for them. As a designer, I hope that I have a certain expertise and background that I can use to facilitate design, but I love how it’s become more of a collaborative thing.

Well this interview is in part to celebrate the product’s one year anniversary and we might say a celebration of its success too.

Absolutely. I think this is a really successful product. With our users, we have a really high satisfaction rate, and by and large they are very happy with the product because it does exactly what they need it to do. Over the last year we have seen a tremendous amount of feedback from those customers who are really loving it and also enhancements they’d like to see — that’s how we are going to take it to the next level this next year.

Webinar: Driving Customer Loyalty through Improved Service Performance

February 17, 2010 by Brenda Dentinger

Customer satisfaction and loyalty are two highly desirable results in a support environment. But which performance factors deliver both?

Join us for an interactive Webinar to hear Dave Brown, president of Support Center University and author of Optimizing Support Center Staffing, explore the difference between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty and explain why both are critical for success.

Attend this interactive remote support Webinar to learn:

  • Which industry best practice is a must-have for your performance program
  • How support performance translates into customer loyalty
  • Key tactics that will ensure both customer satisfaction and loyalty
  • And more…

Date: February 18, 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.