Whether working from the office or working remotely from home, employees rely on their organization’s IT teams much more than they realize. Can’t log in? Call the IT helpdesk. Need to install or upgrade software? Call the IT helpdesk. Whether an employee’s computer has gone too slow, whether someone has accidentally deleted some important files, or even when a computer or digital work device isn’t behaving properly, employees call the IT team, and it gets magically fixed in no time.

In addition to the extensive set of IT tasks, including inventory management, corporate information protection and handling, and organization-wide provisioning and deployments, one of the most important tasks that an enterprise’s IT team executes today is remote IT Support.

Importance of Remote IT Support

The current business landscape is seeing a sharp increase in the adoption of remote and hybrid work cultures, laying great emphasis on workplace flexibility. The recent pandemic catalyzed remote working in nearly all industrial sectors. As the walls of the traditional office spaces have now been broken down, employees operate from diverse locations with heavy dependability on mobile devices to keep them connected and collaborated. The business sector requires instant REMOTE IT support, now more than ever.

The lack of instant remote IT support can lead to the following challenges.

• Prolonged device downtime leads to decreased customer service.
• The inability to use the internet and other applications on the devices leads to lowered productivity.
• Loss of brand reputation and customer trust.
• Inability to achieve the desired targets.
• Excess time, efforts and costs spent by IT admins for on-site visits and manual troubleshooting.

Benefits of Remote IT Support

The present-day IT support and troubleshooting revolves around several strategies, including the break-fix method that involves resolving issues on an ‘as-needed’ bases, swarm solving involving cross-functional team support or separating the incident from the issue, which means resolving the error first and analyzing the root cause later. All these strategies are targeted toward resolving system errors in minimal time.

Having an efficient remote IT support system poses several benefits for businesses, such as:

1. Enabling businesses to sustain enterprise mobility and remote working.
2. Faster response time and rapid resolution compared to manual on-site troubleshooting.
3. Preventing extended system downtime and hampered employee productivity.
4. Simplified issue fixes for unattended devices like digital signages and kiosks.
5. Reduced overhead costs involved in physical site visits.
6. Access to multiple expert technicians from anywhere in the world.
7. Round-the-clock troubleshooting.

Remote IT Support: What Does the Future Hold

Considering the vital role that remote IT support plays in today’s business world, the current curative IT support methods soon ought to be outdated. IT support strategies need to be transformed to cater to the demands of the future.

Let’s look at some predictions about the future roadmap of IT support.

1. Machine Learning for Automation

Machine Learning has already entered our lives on various levels to help us simplify and automate the repetitive chores in an attempt to save time and efforts spent on recurring tasks. For example, your email inbox can be trained to filter out potential spam mails, or shopping websites that make personalized recommendations based on your browsing pattern. This same technology has the underlying power to drive remote IT support to the next level.
Advancements and improvisations in machine learning technology can help IT software identify system errors based on the history of previously encountered issues and execute the necessary corrective measures.

2. Real-Time Virtual Support With 5G

Real-time virtual support already exists in some forms such as VoIP calling or Remote cast and control, which allows employees to personally connect with their organization’s IT admins to resolve system issues faster. However, with the emergence of 5G networks, instant remote troubleshooting using 5G networks to enable face-to-face virtual interactions may soon be a norm. 5G networks open up a new world of possibilities including faster connectivity, high-resolution video calls, rapid data collection and enhanced range accessibility to help IT admins deliver first-hand assistance and issue resolution.

3. Omnichannel Support

Gone are the days when businesses relied on a single ITSM platform or remote support software to resolve their employees’ issues. We are advancing toward the world of omnichannel IT support. Whether it is the in-house IT teams trying to fix system errors rapidly, or third-party managed IT service providers trying to ace their customer service, the ultimate aim is to prevent extended system downtime. Omnichannel IT support strategy involves providing assistance to the users over multiple channels to connect quickly with the IT teams and leverage instant help.

Extending remote IT support over calls, emails, text messages, or even social platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook helps businesses deliver an improved end-user experience and also helps the IT teams reach out to their employees faster.

4. Chatbots

We’re gradually witnessing an increased use of chatbots to tackle the basic issues and offer guidance or resolution. Chatbots are a promising addition to the future of remote IT support which will ideally help businesses boost their overall productivity and lower support costs. The surge in remote working is bound to create an immense workload on the IT teams. Implementing chatbots to analyze the type of issues, create relevant tickets, guide the ticket through the ITSM pipeline and eventually close the resolved issues is sure to help the IT sector manage their service requests better.

5. Predictive Analysis

Besides the curative measures that may shape the future of remote IT support, the business world may see the dawn of a preventive or proactive approach to save efforts on troubleshooting. While the curative measures focus on resolving employees’ issues quickly, the proactive approach will focus on monitoring and analyzing the device usage data generated on an organizational level. This kind of predictive analysis will help IT teams keep track of their inventory’s health and performance and diagnose probable issues much before they become a reality. With this, IT teams can be more proactive and prevent errors from happening beforehand, rather than waiting for an issue to be surfaced in order to resolve it.

Closing Lines

As the corporate world continues to progress through dynamic changes, the IT sector can expect surprising new trends in the near future. Although the future is exciting, it is yet to come. But the present-day business world can still experience the best of remote IT support with the help of the right tools. Scalefusion MDM is a device and endpoint management solution that offers Remote Cast & Control, screen recordings, generation of context-aware ITSM tickets, and much more to expedite your remote support operations.