How to Provide Remote Tech Support

One question that lingered in Chorus employees' minds through this transition was how the company was going to provide tech support. What if a virus infected someone's computer or an application crashed? After all, even though the company maintains a data center in New Jersey, its IT staff also works from home and visits it on an as-needed basis. It's not like a help desk staffer can walk over to someone's desk to troubleshoot and fix problems.

The processes the IT group put in place to resolve technical support issues remotely aren't much different from the measures they took when an employee was working at a client's office and needed help from an IT staffer in New Jersey or Texas.

For example, if an employee is having a software problem-if they get an error message or they can't connect to a particular drive-Aron Schneider, who works in Boyd's IT department, says IT simply takes control of their computer using remote desktop software like iTivity or by setting up a WebEx meeting. Boyd says Chorus uses WebEx extensively to shadow clients and remote workers when troubleshooting and as a teaching and collaboration tool. "If there is something we are trying to resolve or accomplish (loading Citrix at a client site, for example), the team will get on the WebEx and we will talk through the activity. This is a good way of keeping contact and providing training and knowledge transfer," he says.

If an employee's hard drive crashes, the IT staff replaces it with a loaner laptop it has preconfigured with all the basic software apps the employee needs to function. "If they're close enough where I can drive it out to them, I can make a swap," says Schneider. "If they're on site with a client or in New Jersey, we FedEx it to them, and they send their laptop to us."

Schneider couldn't say how having to wait to get a replacement laptop would impact employees' productivity because at that point he said no one had needed a replacement computer. Boyd said most employees would still be able to check e-mail on their home computers and use their cell phones to make calls, but he is aware that having to wait for a replacement laptop could temporarily impair the customer support team. To speed software downloads in the event IT needs to get a fully configured replacement computer to an employee, Boyd is looking for a software-based WAN accelerator.

Boyd says that he hasn't received any complaints from managers about poor tech support now that everyone in IT is working from home. "I gauge most of what I do by the number of complaints I get as head of IT, and I haven't had a lot of issues other than, 'It's really tough for me as a developer to move a big file.'"

The CIO adds that all of the development, testing and quality assurance is done through a corporate Citrix farm using a Microsoft SQL backend.

Chorus's experience shows that providing remote desktop support is not impossible. It just involves some planning and workarounds.