Post COVID Workplace – Changing IT Support Models

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.