Thought Leadership

Need to Speed Time to Resolution for Enterprise Software Support?

stephanie

May 21, 2018 - 3 min read

The Answer is in the Cloud

With organizations highly reliant on enterprise software, your customers’ satisfaction is greatly dependent on your technical support services.

If this pressure isn’t enough, the growing complexity of software products and customer environments means technical support teams face unprecedented challenges recreating and solving customer issues on a daily basis.

Nevertheless, there’s no need for customer support managers to stress.

Read on and you’ll see that it is possible to close more complex technical issues in less time and still keep your costs under control –regardless of the level of complexity of your application and your customers’ environments.

First, Let’s Review Some of the Challenges Encountered by Your Tier 2 and Tier 3 Teams:

The Dreaded Time Sink

The problem is, that no matter how skilled your support teams are, when they spend so much of their time handling non-core tasks, such as creating, configuring and replicating offline versions of your customers’ environments, or worse yet, travelling to customer sites, that’s time that’s not spent actually solving their issues!

These non-core tasks pose a substantial delay in problem resolution time, which may, and often does, have a negative effect on customer retention and company revenues.

Quality and Agility

If your support team uses on-premise labs for problem resolutions, then more challenges arise. When you have multiple physical labs, chances are they are not exactly identical as those labs keep getting manually configured over time. Because they are not exactly the same, some issues might appear to be resolved correctly in one lab but not in another or simply not reproducible in multiple labs.

In addition, with on-premise labs, you simply may not have enough resources for all team members to work in parallel, impacting not only productivity, but agility as well. If you can barely get one team member in the lab when you need them, how can you have two, working on two different approaches at once?

Many global companies make use of globally dispersed support teams to deliver localized service and provide customers with the benefits of true round-the-sun 24/7 support. This requires close collaboration between teams – meaning the ability to capture and share the exact state of an issue so another team member can take over when the first one ends their day.

It also means the ability to share resources, so everyone has access to the correct product versions, customer environments, and popular applications and operating systems for testing.

With all these system resources available, managers also need to make sure that their costs don’t spin out of control by resources left active, but not actually in use.

Sounding Like Mission Impossible?

Considering the multiple challenges faced by technical support teams at software and technology vendors – it looks like providing quick, high-quality support these days has turned into mission impossible.

But surely there’s a solution, and one that makes sense financially as well.

While Clearly Cloud Is the Answer, Commodity Cloud Providers Aren’t Enough

Given the cloud’s potential for virtually infinite resources available on-demand, a cloud-based IT labs solution makes sense.

But commodity cloud infrastructure often proves itself to be not enough when it comes to supporting custom architectures and complex network configurations. Many of which are simply not reproducible “as is” on the giant cloud providers. And if you do pass that hurdle, you very well may be in for an unpleasant surprise when you get your monthly bill stacked with charges for resources unintentionally left running unused.

From Mission Impossible to Mission Possible!

Virtual IT labs from a specialized cloud provider can answer your challenges. Especially a solution that: allows you to upload complex environments to the cloud unchanged, makes it easy for your team to collaborate, and keep your costs under control. With all this, you have a realistic means to quickly resolve complex customer issues and gain customer trust and satisfaction.

Want more details of exactly what to look for and how software vendors can actually benefit?

Get our white paper: “Fast, High-Quality Technical Support: Reality or Pipe Dream?”

Find out more about:

• The advantages of virtual IT labs for environment replication and troubleshooting
• The drawbacks of generic cloud providers
• How leading software vendor, MuleSoft, saves hours to days each time they use virtual IT labs for support.