In our increasingly mobile world, almost all customer support organizations have the need for a remote support tool. Whether supporting internal employees or external customers, we rarely speak with businesses that don't have means of connecting to their end-users devices to troubleshoot technical problems or install software updates. However, remote support can mean something different depending on who you are talking to. We find that many companies are using legacy systems or alternative solutions, like collaboration tools, that weren't necessarily built for support and ultimately lack the ability to scale. We regularly discuss how customer support is becoming a key differentiator for businesses and having the right tools that can grow with your business is essential. With a scalable solution, your support team can lay a solid foundation today that will be easy to build upon tomorrow as the team expands (and as end-user needs increase in volume and complexity).

When evaluating remote support solution, with consideration to both the present and the future, here are three key capabilities to look for:

All of the utility that a company gets out of a support solution starts with a great user interface: one that shows controls transparently, helps beginners to quickly learn the ropes, and aggregates and delivers data without a lot of hoops to jump through.

The interface has to be intuitive – it has to be set up in a way that makes sense. Nested controls with scant instructions lead to headaches. Menus and sub-menus have to be laid out clearly. Utilities and controls have to be well labeled. There has to be a “flow" that the average user can understand and implement.

An easy UI makes a support tool easier to adopt, but it also makes it much easier to scale, because seasoned technicians don't have to stand there holding the hands of new technicians. Anyone who has migrated systems will tell you that the active time spent in training new hires is valuable time that can best be spent elsewhere. So for rapid and efficient scaling, choose a system that's laid out well and makes sense without a lot of book-reading.

To effectively scale a support organization, your remote support tool should have features that empower team leads to easily manage and optimize agent activity. Managers should have the ability to group technicians and provision permissions at a group or technician level. Grouping helps organizations better align the skill sets of the technicians to better address end-user requests. The ability to set user access levels and permissions also helps to streamline the process of serving everyone who is on board in their respective roles – when the system “knows" what each person is doing inside, it becomes easier to handle larger numbers of users.

In addition to team organization and provisioning, support managers should be able to easily gather actionable data from their support tool. Look for technology that provides easy-to-digest dashboards that show meaningful metrics to your team such as: session volume/ frequency, average wait time, handle time, etc. Your remote tool should also record session data for future reference and analysis. By having this data available, managers can implement processes to streamline the work their team is doing (e.g. creating scripts that can be easily deployed for frequent requests, grouping technicians by skill set or demographic served, staffing hours, etc.).

To increase efficiency and perpetuate scale, a remote support platform should be able to integrate. It should have the ability to be linked to a ticketing/help desk program, a CRM, or other enterprise software your team uses.

Why is this important? Because it allows data to flow through a system, to go where it's needed, and provides more transparency. Without integration, data gets caught in “silos" – key information may be hiding in one software program, and inaccessible to another that needs it to show a fuller picture.

No matter the size of an organization, having support tools you can grow with is key to the long term success of the support team, and ultimately the business. For a real-life example, check out how our customer, Motorola built a scalable support strategy with Rescue.