We live in interesting times, some would
perhaps say dangerous. Needless to say, the world has changed forever and it is
up to us to adopt small and large changes in the way we live and work while
adhering to new norms like social distancing, work from home and telecommuting.
A recent survey by Gartner reveals
that a large number of CFOs are expecting 5-20% of previously office-bound
employees to permanently work from home with immediate effect. This is in
addition to employees that already work from home frequently. This
brings a new challenge for IT Services companies that provide IT Support
services – providing IT support to remote employees with no access to physical
corporate resources, while maintaining user satisfaction and experience.
Traditional IT Support model
In a
traditional support model, there are broadly 2 kinds of support – remote and
desk-side – and these should be seen in the light of the ongoing pandemic
situation. Remote desktop support, as the name suggests, involves taking remote
control of the affected device and troubleshooting issues. In desk-side support
or Field services, a desktop technician who is dedicated to the location like a
Headquarters or a large office with hundreds of users actually visits the
user’s desk and physically works on the affected device leading to increased
contact and exposure, thereby potentially violating distancing norms. Clearly,
Remote support is the safest method as it involves no human-human contact.
In case the
user is in a remote location or small branch office, IT Service Providers
provide “Dispatch” support in which a technician from headquarters or from a
partner company visits the user and provides technical support at a
pre-scheduled time. Again, this model will expose users to infection as the
Partner resources are traveling from one office to the other or even one
customer to the other, and can be carriers of the epidemic. With the movement
of people restricted during pandemics, the situation is further aggravated as
the dispatched technician will not be allowed to travel at all.
IT Support Model Transformation
When
everyone’s working from home, how do companies provide technical support to end
users while efficiently redeploying skilled dedicated or dispatch technicians
in a Post-COVID scenario? What are the different support tools or levers that
organizations can adopt? How should IT Service providers evolve? There are
multiple considerations and some are listed here:
- Self-help
and Self-service technologies: As we enter a Post-COVID
life, there is greater awareness among end-users on maintaining social
distancing and reduced human contact. End users will have to be trained in
new ways of working with more emphasis on self-help and self-service. To
enable the users to help themselves and adapt, Cognizant can help
organizations deploy new solutions that leverage AI and ML so that
dependencies on traditional IT Support continues to reduce. Real-time
monitoring tools like Nexthink or Aternity could be deployed to detect
anomalies in end-user devices and auto-resolve them thus eliminating the
need for support. Further, organizations will be encouraged to invest in
How-to videos and end-user facing Standard Operating Procedure documents
to empower users and enable them to resolve issues on their own.
- AR-VR-enabled
support: Technologies such as Augmented Reality and
Virtual Reality can go a long way in improving the overall deliverability
of Remote Support. By deploying suitable apps like Vuforia or ARKit on end
user’s mobile, the user can enable video on his smartphone and get remote
assistance from the central IT support desk. The remote technician will be
able to use the power of virtual and augmented reality to pass remote
assistance instructions by simply annotating directions that appear on
users' smartphone screen. The end-user will have a better understanding of
the instructions being passed and is more likely to accomplish tasks
successfully. Cognizant has capabilities in deploying AR-VR solutions and
can help organizations build an AR adoption roadmap & deploy
Enterprise Architecture enhancements.
- Virtual
Desktop support: Technologies such as Virtual
Desktops, Remote Access, etc are now more relevant than ever and support
for these technologies will be in greater demand than ever before. In
order to eliminate support issues and dependency on hardware, organizations
will adopt Virtual desktops and BYOD moving forward. In this scenario, end
users will use their own familiar hardware such as personal desktops,
laptops, and tablets to access corporate resources such as VDI or
Published applications. Their employer is not going to be responsible for
hardware support and end-users will have to approach their own
supplier/retailer for support under warranty. Organizations providing IT
Services however will have to rethink their strategies around skillsets
required off their technicians. It will be imperative for technicians to
get reskilled in Desktop Virtualization, Remote Access, etc. as there will
be technical troubleshooting skills required in these environments as
well.
- Unified
Endpoint Management: As organizations open up to the
concept of work from home, from any device and greater adoption of BYOD,
it is important to ensure that the devices are configured to access
corporate resources in a secure manner. Organizations may leverage
multiple existing tools or acquire new ones to manage different types of
devices running operating systems like Windows, Mac OS, iOS, Chrome and
Android. However, by deploying a Unified Endpoint management tool,
customers can ensure device compliance in terms of updates and patches and
also enforce security and group policies across the organization. To
ensure security, Cognizant can help deploy smarter conditional access
policies and enable real-time visibility, compliance, and auto-remediation
across all endpoints. From a support standpoint, end-users will have a
greater device experience with new capabilities such as self-service
features for application access, domain password reset, BitLocker
recovery, remote wipe, and lock among others, thus significantly reducing
dependency on people-centric IT support.
- Walk-up
service: Several large organizations have a Help Lounge or Walk-up Services desk that is completely human-driven. Desktop
Technicians man these Lounges and help walk-in users with resolving their
IT issues, be it a laptop hardware issue or an Outlook mail issue. Many
organizations have turned these lounges into experience zones where
employees can walk-in and experience new products, seek assistance, gather
information or interact with IT for any requirements. With COVID enforcing
social distancing and remote working, these help lounges will no longer
depend on humans for assistance. Smart Lockers can be installed, for users
to safely swap devices such as broken laptops without coming into any
human contact. Sanitization controls can be enforced so that disease
transfer risk is minimized. Self-help Kiosks can be deployed that allow a
remote worker to drive to the nearest office, plug his machine into a
Kiosk, and get immediate diagnostics and assistance for any technical issues
through automated scripts. The kiosks can also directly connect with a
Remote technician for providing guidance and expertise. Users get 24x7
access to these machines, which greatly reduces any wait time and
increases their productivity.
