In the last year, with Covid-19 and many companies opting to go remote, there will have been some businesses that weren’t happy with working from home! A big reason for working from home not being ideal for people is the relative lack of IT support at home. We spoke with TechQuarters, a company providing IT support services in London, on how IT support can be delivered to people working from home.
“Being an IT support company ourselves, we found the transition to homeworking pretty easy!” says TechQuarters, “but you’d be surprised at how many IT support issues can be solves remotely.”
While many studies suggest that as much as 80% of all technical occurrences can be fixed remotely, there will of course be times when on-site support is still required. “Most of our customers are located in and around London, and they still want to know that have access to in-person London IT support,” says TechQuarters, “and we do still offer callouts to people’s sites. Sometimes it’s unavoidable.”
But what are some of the ways in which remote IT support is achieved? At its core, it is enabled through the use of remote support tools. Products such as TeamViewer, AnyDesk, NinjaRMM, and many others, when installed on both devices, allows an IT engineer to remotely access an end-user’s PC or laptop through their own console. From there, the IT technician can request control of the user’s device in order to properly investigate an issue. The remote support tool may also have features like command line access, making it easy for IT technicians to use the command-line interface; there may also feel file transfer and synchronisation features.
“The remote support tools are actually just one half of the equation,” says TechQuarters, “it’s also important for technicians to be able to communicate clearly with the users they are supporting.”
If you’re seeking remote IT support you want to be able to clearly describe the problems, be able to ask your IT technician questions, and in general communicate throughout the process. The remote tools used by your IT technician may have a desktop sharing feature, allowing you to view what’s going on, whilst you communicate via the phone. Another alternative is a video calling application. “At our workplace we use Microsoft Teams,” says TechQuarters, “we do nearly all our internal work through it, and its often the easiest way to communicate with our customers when they need support.”
So, this IT Support Company in London seem confident that remote IT support is a highly viable alternative to traditional in-house IT support. Is 80% of all IT cases enough to justify going fully remote with your IT support? Will the percentage of cases that require on-site support decrease even further? Only time will tell.