Technical Support for Dummies: One-Click Happiness

The traditional helpdesk model requires too many steps from the user and from technical support:

1. The user calls support / fills out an incident description form. The accuracy of the description here completely depends on the competence of the user, which is often not high, and sometimes too high, which is also not the best option.
2. The support officer begins / continues to fill out an incident description form. No organizational measures allow to reduce to zero the number of applications in which the incident is described insufficiently, incorrectly or not at all.
3. Only after this begins the real work of diagnosing and eliminating the incident.

Obviously, in this scheme, the first two steps are redundant and redundant. Not surprisingly, both users and technical support staff are striving to evade the obligation to fill out applications. We figured out how to do without them.

Two Russian companies, ProLAN and Smartnut, combined their products and as a result, a solution emerged combining monitoring and diagnostic systems and automation of service processes.

The solution combines three components:



Proactive health monitoring system for IT infrastructure and the quality of IT services ProLAN SLA-ON ,including an expert system that in real time measures and evaluates the status of each component of the IT Infrastructure (network equipment, servers, communication channels) and business applications. The keyword here is proactive, i.e. in many cases, information about an incident in the system appears earlier than that of the user. ProLAN SLA-ON is far from the only proactive monitoring system on the market, but compare the cost of the solutions.



Rapid Incident Diagnostics Red Button- A USB device connected to the user's computer or. By clicking on the button, the user sends a technical support request about the incident, as well as a slice of the health of the IT infrastructure at the time of the incident. (In fact, the Red Button is, of course, the program running on the user's computer and can be called up from the keyboard or with a mouse click, but the real red button is cool. An excellent solution to the bosses table). The description of the incident in this case does not depend on the user's qualifications. Support receives information that is sufficient for recording, qualifying and diagnosing incidents. The pilot operation of the Red Button shows that the data transferred to technical support can reduce incident closure time by 30% and increase the number of incidents closed by the first support line by 75%.



Smartnut Customer Service Process Automation System - SaaS service automation system for small IT service companies and IT services. Smartnut includes a reconfigured Service Desk process model, so small companies can start using Smartnut immediately after registering with the system. The integration of Smartnut and the Red Button ProLAN eliminates the human factor from the technical support side: instead of the first line operator who receives the customer’s call and enters something inarticulate into the application, the incident is automatically registered in the system and all the necessary information is applied to it.

In total, the new helpdesk model looks like this:

1. In the best case, the user does not notice the incident at all. In the worst, you only need to press a button. Minus subjectivity, the human factor and the time spent by technical support staff and the user on unproductive communication with each other. And of course, the saved technical support nerves, as users after incidents are often overly emotional.
2. Technical support receives a completed application, including all the necessary diagnostic information. No more applications with a slurred description or no description at all.
3. Universal happiness from the quick resolution of incidents and the rapidly growing KPI technical support.