Resolution Times Decrease 75 Percent with Appliance-Based Remote Support
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December 14, 2006Download mp3 | Read Transcript
Welcome to the SSPA webcast: "Resolution Times Decrease 75 Percent with Appliance-based Remote Support". Presenting on behalf of the SSPA is John Ragsdale, SSPA Vice President of Research. Also presenting will be Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner, and Nathan McNeill, Co-founder and VP of Product Management-BomgarTM. And now, to begin the webcast, John Ragsdale.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Hello everyone and welcome to this SSPA webcast sponsored by BomgarTM. Our topic today is optimization and how appliance-based remote support offers some dramatic improvements in resolution times for tech support issues. My name is John Ragsdale and I'm the Vice President of Research for the SSPA. I'm joined on today's webcast by Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner, and Nathan McNeill, BomgarTM co-founder and VP of Product Management. Thank you both for joining me today.
Before we get started, a couple of housekeeping items for you. If you would like a copy of the slides used in today's webcast, please check back on our website later this week. We'll have this entire webcast available on-demand in case you want others in your organization to listen in, and we will also make the slides available for download. We encourage all of you to participate and you'll find a new question button on the ON24 screen. As questions occur to you, go ahead and submit them and we'll keep all of the questions in a queue for the question and answer period later in the webcast.
You'll also notice that you have an enlarge button which blows up the ON24 panel and allows you to see more of the screen detail, which is really helpful for some of the screenshot slides. So, keep that in mind. And, with that, let's go ahead and get started.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
We're talking about optimization, and optimization is always a hot topic with customer service and support. When I'm doing presentations and conferences I usually ask for a raise of hands for anybody with a bigger budget next year and typically very few hands, if any, go up. I know that everybody out there right now is working on 2007 budgets and so far I haven't found any member that has an additional head count coming in 2007. So, clearly finding new ways to streamline and raise productivity within your technical support operation is really important. So, we do talk a lot about optimization but I have three points here that I want to make that are really driving optimization to be a much more critical issue than it has been in the past. And, the first is this move toward proactive service. For those of you who were able to attend our conference in Washington, D.C. last month, you heard J.B. Wood, our CEO, talk about service delivery in the future and the importance of proactive service. And, it's really becoming an issue that customers are aware of and customers really just don't want to invest the time in having their problems solved. They would love for the problems to be solved with little or no involvement from themselves. It's very irritating to have to sit on a phone call for an hour being walked through recovery procedures.
Next we have concerns about security and privacy. And, I've been using this phrase "convenience overrides paranoia" about remote support. For a lot of years now, when it first started in IT support test using it to support their employees, there was a big outrage from a lot of employees saying, "Oh my God! IT is looking at my desktop and reviewing what I'm typing on the screen," and quickly they realized that there was such a value added to them that that convenience definitely was overriding their paranoia. And next, we saw the remote support going out to external customers using PC products, peripherals, and software. And, the same thing. At first they were a little uncomfortable with it until they saw the value and that they could trust the technology. And, I think that this paranoia issue has come to a different point now because we have a lot of legislation that is really making us all - we have to be aware of these issues whether it's in the healthcare industry with HIPAA compliance or even the financial services industry has a lot of new privacy legislation, and Sarbanes-Oxley in general is actually driving all companies to be much more concerned about data integrity and privacy. So I think once again it's important that we show the business value around the remote support and prove that we are not letting any security loopholes come into our operations with this technology.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
And finally, when it comes to optimization, clearly there's come additional tools that we need beyond how we're doing things today because the existing systems in place in most support organizations is simply not adequate to meet the increasing volume and the increasing complexity that we're seeing.
On the next slide I have some data for you from the SSPA Benchmark Database and we ask our members how complex are the products that they support. And we see that back in 2003 members were pretty evenly split. Forty percent said that their products were moderately complex and forty percent said that their products were highly complex. But, look at the change in just three years, and in 2006 we have about 2/3 of members saying that the products they support are highly complex. Very few, only 10% say standard, and the moderate group has dropped from about 43% to about 25%. So, clearly the products that we're giving our consumer and our enterprise users are much more complex and that definitely impacts their need for support as well as the service level that we're seeing.
On the next slide, I think this complexity is having a direct correlation on the service level we're delivering and I have a couple of examples of that. The first is average talk time. We see during that same period when complexity increased so much, we see that the average talk time of a tech support incident has grown from 13.3 minutes up to 14.6 minutes. And, if you think about what the impact of that is, reps that are taking longer on every call are taking fewer calls per shift and that means that customers are holding longer for an agent and the average service level, and the customer's satisfaction level, can be impacted.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
And, on the next slide we see, I think, a correlating metric in first call resolution rate. And that had a 9% drop, which I think is pretty significant, from 2003 at 53.8% to currently 44. Less than half now of calls are resolved on the first interaction. In the SSPA News every month we ask a question, and the question we asked last month was: in what area did your company make significant improvements in 2006? And, the responses were, 40% of people said that they were able to make a big difference in deflecting interactions to unassisted channel, pushing more customers to web self-service. We also had responses about service levels and customer satisfaction. But, we had zero members say that they were able to increase first call resolution rate or decrease average incident open time. So, we see that this complexity is really impacting our ability to deliver excellent service and I think that that is putting more pressure on all of us to find tools that can really streamline this process and make up for that jump in complexity.
So, on the next slide, I was going through the SSPA Benchmark data looking for some interesting information to use in this webcast and I came across this question that I had not used before. And, in the benchmark, we asked our members to rate the tools that are most useful for resolving technical support issues. And, I think that the findings here are really interesting. The single most useful tool for solving customer support problems is the ability to view a customer log file and that is something, of course, that is inherent in remote support solutions.
No. 2, is of course the knowledge base that we all know and love and the third, following closely to those two, is remote control. So, we see that remote support is including the No. 1 and the No. 3 most useful tools for issue resolution.
We know that about 65% of our members are using remote support today. However, the average satisfaction with the tools they're using is not that high. On a scale of 1-5 with five being extremely happy, we see that the average satisfaction for the remote support in place is only a 3.5. So, just slightly over the middle of satisfaction. So, I think that we do have some opportunity here. I think that there are a lot of new features and functions out there that a lot of companies are not taking advantage of. So, I'm going to close today with some tips.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
One of our technology surveys a couple of months ago - we found out that 19% of our members have budget to buy new support tools in the next year. So, I know that a lot of you are shopping and I want to give you some hints.
Out of our leadership conference last month in Washington, D.C., I had an opportunity to visit all of our partners who deliver different remote support, remote control tools. And, unlike other areas in customer service and e-service, I found that there really are some differentiating characteristics between these products and I wanted to highlight just a few that you should really look for when you're trying to differentiate products.
First, is the deployment model. We've heard a lot in CRM about hosted versus on-premise. But, when it comes to remote support, we actually have a third option for deployment model and that's something you're going to hear more about today from BomgarTM. And, that is the idea of an appliance. And, an appliance seems to be a really good way, not only to get up and running quickly, but get around some of those security issues that we're all concerned about with remote control.
And secondly is, look at the environments to be supported. I found that not everyone supports Macs. And, even though you think your companies are very PC centric or your customers are very PC centric, you can't overlook the fact that Macintosh is pretty well adopted between - among the college age people, anyone who uses graphics heavily - we were talking yesterday about how Macs are very common in marketing organizations. So, remember that Mac does have immolation software to run PC software. So, you may find that even if you're selling PC software you've got some Mac users out there. So again, just something to keep in mind.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
And finally, look at the ancillary features. You may be buying it for remote support, remote control, the remote diagnostics, but there are some other features that not everyone has and you need to find the mix of features that makes the most sense for you. A couple of those I'll highlight is web collaboration, web chat, goes along with the remote support and, if you have a good tool for chatting with customers, it means not only do you free the customer up from the phone, it means that agents can handle one or more interactions simultaneously if that makes sense in your operation.
And, the other thing which personally I wish we had with our IT department, was the automatic reboot and reconnect. It seems that some point in every one of these remote control sessions you may have to reboot the computer and, if you're using some systems, that means that after the customer reboots they have to log back in, request another remote session, and start that process all over again instead of just automatically rebooting and reconnecting which is a great feature.
So, keep those in mind and I would really recommend that you listen closely to what our guest speakers have to say today. Try to understand what is specific to these solutions that you might not find in others and these are the things that you should include when you're preparing an RFI.
So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to our next speaker, Mr. Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager from Practice Partner. Malcolm, if you're ready, take it away.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
Thank you John. I wanted to - well, first of all, I wanted to thank you all for attending. It's my pleasure to talk about our story and what our technical support department faced in the past couple years and describe how we found a solution, and how it's been working quite well.
To begin with I want to talk about who we are and then I would like to talk about how we used to connect to BomgarTM prior to, excuse me, how we used to connect to PCs prior to BomgarTM. Then, I want to talk about what kind of solutions we looked for and where we looked for those solutions. And then, how BomgarTM fit our needs. And finally, I'd like to add some concluding remarks.
Practice Partner is a software application company. We develop products for the medical records, so electronic medical records, and we develop medical billing and medical scheduling software for the healthcare industry. We're located in downtown Seattle and we started in 1983, pretty much in the beginning of the PC age. So, we've been around for quite awhile and our product has also gotten to be quite complex over the years. And, we've added quite a bit of third-party applications as well as connections to SQL Server, and Oracle, and other back end databases. We have 1,500 customers throughout the U.S. including about 6,000 providers that are using our product; 125 employees and we're an all-in-one shot meaning that we develop the application, we run the QA on it, we produce - we actually produce it here, we create the media that we send out to customers including the documentation, and we support it, implement it, and provide all the customer service.
We have three departments that need to connect to PCs at our company. First of all, our technical support department. They are our biggest users and they connect to our customers who reside across the U.S. And, we also have an Implementation and Consulting Department and they're responsible for training and installing the software, and they also use this product heavily. And finally, we have our own internal IT department and our IT department uses it to connect to our employees PCs and to solve and resolve problems.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
I want to focus my story on our technical support department because this is where we were having the biggest problem connecting to our customers' PCs. We have 24 employees and they're distributed between Seattle and our office, our technical support office, in Columbia, Missouri. Most customers are doctor's offices that are typically less than 100 PCs and they really don't have anybody that knows too much about PCs and troubleshooting PCs. So, they rely on us to help them quite a bit. We've had some metrics that we were measuring prior to our choice of BomgarTM product and one of those is the meeting response time. We were measuring the meeting resolution time as well as customer satisfaction.
For instance, every customer that calls in is sent a survey and we also measure our support revenue. When customers are not happy with our support and their issues there we typically have had to give discounts in order to keep them as customers.
Now, I'd like to set up the problem that we were facing in April of 2005. Our current remote control software was really not up to the current technology and security demands of 2005. We were using pcAnywhereTM. First of all, there was a cost associated to it for our customers' standpoint. They had to buy a license and we also had to buy a license for it. They had to - we were using typically dial-up lines at the time. The stream refresh rates were a bit slow when we did that. pcAnywhere also worked over the internet as well so that did help in some cases. There was also limited access at the site. For instance, customers would only install it on one PC but typically were troubleshooting problems on a variety of different PCs at the office, or perhaps even on their server.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
There were also security concerns. Encryption was not easily enforced on pcAnywhere and customers would set up passwords but there wasn't any kind of a strong password management or requirements on their end. So, this left them vulnerable to attack, especially over the internet. And then finally, there were versioning conflicts. pcAnywhere would update their software - upgrade the software every year and, with newer versions, there were version incompatibilities as customers would have a newer version than we would or we would have a newer version than our customers would.
There are other ways that we connected as well. Some of our customers required that we connect to them via Citrix or RDP. And then, what really tipped us off, or what really got us into trouble, were VPNs. And, that was the most frustrating part of remote control connection. The VPNs in 2005 were really flooding our customers. They were installing them primarily as a result of HIPAA security requirements that were - the regulations that were published in 2005. And so, as each of our customers started choosing different VPN methods and VPN products, we would have to constantly install these clients on different PCs within our office. And, if you've had any experience with different VPN clients, they don't work very well together on one computer. So, this presented a technical challenge.
Secondly, the challenge of even installing these VPNs - VPN clients on software. Typically that would require a member of my own IT staff as well as a customer's IT staff or consultant. And then, the technical support rep is trying to connect to that computer. There was lots of time that was wasted on this as well as - and then there was also training. We would have to train our reps on how to use the different clients. So, things were getting pretty frustrating around here and our customers were also frustrated because we couldn't connect very quickly to their systems.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
And, it all boils down to - or I can summarize this in this - in a nutshell here by this email. This is pretty much the last straw that got us going and looking for a new solution. And, let me read this to you. This is from one of our technical support reps, one of our senior technical support reps, who already had some experience with hosted-based remote control software. "We're wasting an incredible amount of time trying to access customer networks to multiple VPN clients on a limited number of machines. Now, today, I come in and cannot connect to the site. During the one fail over - fail event they isolate from me all week because installing one too many VPN clients on the stand alones had disabled the others." The laptop that we'd given him didn't have any clients loaded, and he concludes, "Well, better to stay at home where I can connect and help the customer."
So, we gathered Paul together with some other folks and started defining some of the requirements we are looking for in a solution. And, this is what we came up with. We really needed something fast that wouldn't take very long to install on the client's end and also wouldn't take long to set up on our end. We wanted something easy so that our customers who are not technically savvy, PC savvy, would be able to install very easily. We wanted something that was inexpensive. For us this was a mid-year capital budget expense that wasn't budget so we had to amend our capital budget for that. It had to be a part that was reliable and that could connect all the time. One of the problems we faced with pcAnywhere, and especially with sites that had modems, was that if they didn't use their modem for quite a while, for a few months, then when they tried to connect via pcAnywhere over the modem, suddenly the modem wasn't working or there was a configuration problem. So, this solution had to overcome that problem. We wanted to be able to connect to anybody anywhere and finally, we wanted it to be HIPAA compliant.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
Now, if you aren't familiar with the HIPAA security regulations, they came out in April 2005, applied to all healthcare related entities and any of their business partners. And, it relates to protecting and securing the patient's data and this is data that typically identifies a patient: address, names, phone numbers, social security numbers. And, it protects this data during access, transmission, and storage. And, in our case, for remote control software, we wanted to make sure that the part we were going to use had 256-bit AES encryption and that there was a form of authorization authentication on the other end that was useful.
So, we looked for a variety of different solutions. First of all, eliminated any kind of software installs, like pcAnywhere, that did not meet the fast and easy criteria. We didn't want anything pre-configured on the customer's end. So, that made us look at the hosted providers. This would be WebEx or Placeware, Live Meeting, or GoToAssist. And, we also looked in appliances and the only one we looked at was BomgarTM and we chose BomgarTM because it met all of our criteria. It was pretty fast. What's really neat is that their download is less than 400K. It was easy. No client configuration is required on either end whether it's our reps or on the customer's side. It was fairly inexpensive. The costs are comparable to WebEx or Placeware for the first year, but the second year support renewals are much cheaper.
And then, it was reliable. We can essentially manage it here at our IT department and we can connect anywhere over the internet as long as Port 443 was open and that's pretty much the case in most firewalls. And finally, it was HIPAA compliant. It did incorporate 256-bit SSL encryption and also allowed for customers to authorize connections. And also, cancel or close any connections are their convenience.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
So, the bonus ... the initial bonus items here were that we didn't have any HIPAA concerns about the hosted solutions. We didn't want to worry about what the hosted solution was doing with the file transfers that were going on. We wanted to make sure that we were able to send files back and forth to customers and do it securely as typically we would have to update their data or they would want to send us data. We also really liked the chat feature that's included. That allowed our reps to hang up on the site and just communicate to the site via chat and allowed our sites to free up their phones as well. A lot of times we're talking to ... we're working on the receptionist's computer and they would need their telephone available for their own use.
We can also now work on multiple computers from one reps PC. So, a rep would have ... like typically they'll have two, or three, sometimes four sessions that they are working on. In some sessions we're waiting for some indexing to go on or for some data to be copied and meanwhile the rep can be efficient and work at another site's computer.
Another benefit here was that our reps are able to transfer these sessions to other reps and they can escalate it to a more senior rep. This has saved quite a bit of time and made this transition very smooth from our customers' standpoint. The installation took about an hour for us so that was great. In fact, after it was installed, one of my team members came in and expressed he was that this new edition to our server room was actually ... took up very low maintenance on his end and very low overhead as far as getting it up and running.
We in the IT department use the BomgarTM for internal PC uses or PC issues and I want to also say that Bomgar's support has been excellent and it has been really nice working with them. And, that's also a factor that we didn't incorporate initially but we're pleased that they have top quality support.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
The last bonus item here is a dialogue box that shows up when the local machine - when the connection is over, when our reps disconnect. And, the dialogue box basically tells the end user, the customer, that BomgarTM has been completely removed and their computer cannot be viewed or accessed in any way. And, as far as some of the conclusions for this talk, here's some metrics that we were able to measure from before and after. We were able to reduce our median response time by 64% and our median resolution time decreased by 75%. And, we can track - we can also track customer satisfaction improvement directly as a result of this.
These measurements are based on the month prior to. In the month of April I took measurements from April and then just - and then after BomgarTM was installed. And so, this has been a tremendous improvement for our customers and for our support staff as well. They are very, very happy with it.
Support revenue is also improving. We're seeing anecdotally that. we haven't done actual measurements yet, comparisons, but we have had fewer cases of frustrated customers wanting support discounts.
Some intangible benefits are no frustrations. Our employees are able to use this tool without much effort. The IT staff that administers this Box doesn't need - we don't need to provide any additional help to our employees other than setting up user IDs and passwords on the system. We don't have any employees that would rather stay at home where they can connect and, as a result of this entire project ... and I should say that from the time of initial requirements which was in early May to the time of deployment which was, I believe, in early June, so it was like a 30 to 45 day process from start to finish, it was a very smooth process. As a result of that, we were recognized by InfoWorld magazine as one of the top 100 IT projects in 2005.
And, that concludes my portion of the talk. I want to thank you for listening and I'd also like to pass the presentation baton to Nathan McNeill from BomgarTM.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Thank you Malcolm. Thanks for going through that. I'm going to give you a little bit of information about BomgarTM, kind of get a little bit more in detail about the product and the company. We are the only appliance-based remote support solution on the market currently. We have about 2,000 customers in all 50 states and we about 33 countries internationally. And, our customer base really runs the gamut. We have SMB customers from construction, IT consulting. You'll have customers that are supporting construction trailers, you know, there's a PC or two in each one of those. And also, Fortune 1000, Fortune 500, customers in numerous verticals. Financial and healthcare are both strong verticals for us largely because of the appliance mode. Also, government education IT services as well.
And then, about the Bomgar BoxTM, it allows you to connect to any computer anywhere in the world in just a few seconds. The rep would just direct the user to a website and then have them click on a link. And then, that's going to connect them with the rep. It's usually about a 10-15 second process total. We also include built-in file transfer and chat. And all that as well, as Malcolm mentioned, is encrypted so it's along the same secure communication channel.
One of the features that John mentioned early in the presentation is the reboot/auto-reconnect feature. One of the applications for this is if you're, for instance, supporting a Law Office. You've got a $400.00 lawyer on the other end of the line; he's not going to want to sit there and wait for you to see if he needs to reconnect back into the session after a reboot. It allows you to work unattended without the user having to reconnect to you each time you have to do a reboot.
We also have to include session transfer and share so you can transfer sessions to different reps or different groups of reps and also share sessions so you can have one rep, excuse me, two or three reps who are collaborating over a single support session. And also, we have a tabbed interface so that a rep can easily, without getting too lost in the different interfaces, manage multiple sessions simultaneously, move between them, and we also allow you to detach the tabs so you have multiple sessions' tabs side by side.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
And, it is a 30-minute deployment on average. We give our customers the pizza box challenge which is, once they get their Box, order a pizza. By the time the pizza gets there you should have the Box up and running. That's not always the case. Sometimes we run into complications but usually that's the case. Usually no longer than that. That's a little bit about how it works.
It does allow both the rep and the customer to connect from any location without firewall configuration so there's no preinstalled client and it works through any firewall using standard web ports 80 and 443. It does work for the Mac OS 10 platform so you can support your PCs and your Macs. Again, that's a big deal especially for the educational market. And then, also support for Vista, just in case you were wondering, is coming out end of January so that will be available as well.
That's a little bit about how the process would work for the support rep gaining control of the machine. The support rep would monitor the queue for incoming sessions and he can monitor his personal queue as well as queues that are designed around the team concept. So, he may be a member of multiple teams that are monitoring multiple queues for different types of issues.
The user can initiate a session in three different ways. And, the administrator has a choice of which of these methods shows up on a public template. The first method at the top there is display names where the user can click on the name of the support rep and then it's going to connect them directly. We also include the Option 2 session keys so that they can enter a session key which the rep has provided them and then connect with the rep, or enter a support request form that basically specifies what their issue is, what category it falls into, and then that gets entered into a queue that is monitored by multiple reps or teams of reps.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
This is always user initiated so the rep is never demanding or taking control of the user's PC. The user's always granting control. And, the user has to grant explicit control as well. It's not just open a file. They have to click "grant remote control to the support rep". they can also choose to grant "view only" privilege to the rep which is that the rep can see the screen, can see what's going on which is a huge help, but is unable to move the customer's mouse, or type on the keyboard, or file transfer. A lot of times that's used by our customers with first tier support reps.
So, once the rep gains control it's just like being on-site, like if they were in front of the physical console of the remote PC, and this puts the rep in the cockpit, lets the user sit back, and it's usually a lot less stressful for both parties.
At the end of the session, the client is completely removed from the remote PC. There's no trace of it left and the user - two things happen. The user's forwarded to a page where they can enter feedback about the rep. This is completely customizable. You can add up to ten questions and then choose what type of questions you'd like to have whether combo boxes, or radio buttons, check boxes, text entry fields, whatever you want. In addition to that, as Malcolm mentioned, you have a dialogue box that comes up and informs the user that, yes, the client has been completely removed and the rep can no longer gain access. And, that dialogue box is customizable as well.
Some of the benefits the solution provides are that you can decrease incident-handling times. We've seen ranges anywhere from 20-75% but it's nearly always fairly dramatic. It's the difference between seeing the problem and having to interpret it through the user. It can make a huge difference. Also, first-call resolution rates increase as well. This is fairly simple it's that the rep can confirm that the issue has been resolved instead of relying on the user's judgment as to whether or not they think it was resolved. Sometimes it's not always clear whether the issue was fixed but with remote support they're able to really confirm that.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
You also see a decrease in call escalation. When you think about it, first tier usually has to figure out what second tier may know already. So, first tier, if they can see the screen, and if they can move the mouse, and if they can work on the system they're much more likely to be able to resolve that issue and not have to pass it on to second tier. This reduces your overall support cost because normally first tier is much less expensive per minute than second tier.
Also, you're going to improve customer satisfaction ratings. It's, again, less frustrating for the customer, less frustrating for the rep, everyone wins. And, the result of all this is that your support center becomes much more productive. Some of the things that John was talking about earlier in the presentation are that complexity's increasing. Applications are getting more and more complex and they're connecting to more and more other types of applications. And, the user doesn't really care whose problem it is as long as the problem gets fixed whether it's the problem with your application or the problem with an application that your application connects to.
In addition to that, budgets for the support department are not likely to go up. So, you have an increase in complexity but not an increase in budget. The typical scenario of, you know, the development department announces, "We have this new product. We're selling it to NASA. It's going to be used to launch the space shuttle and you're going to have to support it. That shouldn't be a problem, right?" You've got two guys, I saw them in the break room yesterday. They were just sitting around. Put them on it without any increase in resources. So, you have to find a way to do more with the resources you have. And, we believe that remote support is a key way of doing that, a key way of increasing your support center's productivity. So, how do you do that? Which solution do you choose? Start with the dollars and cents.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
With BomgarTM you can purchase the Box. You own it. It's yours. And then, we have a 20% yearly maintenance fee after that. With the other solutions on the market - with WebEx and with GoToAssist it's an ongoing monthly fee per rep, per month. Because of that, you save a lot of money with BomgarTM over time by capitalizing the expense, purchasing it up front, and saving money as the years go by. Again, usually the first year expenses, we may be slightly more. We're comparable but every year after that you begin saving money.
BomgarTM security has two aspects. The first of which is the bits and bytes. And, we view this as kind of the entry ticket to the market. In other words, you're not going to play without the basics covered which is 256 AES SSL encryption, industry standard SSL secured web interfaces. The Box is pre hardened so you don't have to do any additional hardening on the server once you ... on the Box once you install it in your data center. And, you don't really have to take our word for this either. We had the whole appliance, the application included, audited by Symantec corporation and can read the results of that on our website. This is kind of two fold. One was a source code evaluation and then the other was a product penetration assessment based on the results of that evaluation of the source code. It's really a thorough audit of the security of the solution from a technical standpoint.
From an information security standpoint the fact that we deploy through an appliance is extremely significant. This is, again, comes back to the number of attack factors that you're having to deal with. With a productized solution like the Box where it's self contained and componentized, it's ... you're dealing with the attack factors relative to the product. With the service you're dealing with the attack factors relative to the product as well as to the company surrounding the product. As a result of that, your exposure and your responsibility increases. It's not that it's impossible to use a third party for this type of application, it's just that it does expose your company to additional responsibility and additional liability. The bottom line is that if you use a vendor or use a third party service and you're routing information through a third party service, you have to treat the vendor like an extension of your company. You're responsible for them. You choose your friends and you have to make sure that they are using your customers' data, or handling your customers' data, through the remote control sessions in a manner compliant with your industry's regulations.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Because, when it comes down to it, you can't outsource your liability to a third party service and you'll be held responsible for whatever happens. I'll end my tirade there and give a quote from Matt Healey with IDC which is, "On-site remote support solutions enable customers to directly control the security of their IT environment and realize the benefits of remote support."
BomgarTM has several customers who are simply unable, no option, due to corporate policy to use a third party for remote support. It's just a decision was made above their heads and it was not an option that they had to use a third party type of solution. With the Box, the customer installs it behind their existing security infrastructure and their existing compliance posture so it allows you to use all the tools and weapons you've already built for security and compliance without changing anything or increasing your exposure.
A few other things related to information security. One is the granular administration support rep privileges so the administrator can go in and basically decide on a feature by feature or tool by tool level what the rep can or cannot do on the remote machine; whether they can file transfer, whether they can remote control, etc. Also, each session as I mentioned earlier is ad hoc so there's no resident client. There's no - and the rep is unable to get control any time he wishes to the machine. The user always has to give him control each time. It's only off. On only by request. So, we also include a feature called session recording which basically gives you a video filing of each and every session that goes through the Box so that you can see not only the "what" of what happened during the session but also the "who" of who performed the action. So, if it was the rep that clicked the button, you'll see that it was the rep that clicked that button and not the customer. So, you know kind of who's responsible for what happened.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
From an integration standpoint we include an API that would allow you to pull reporting data elsewhere if you wanted to, like to a storage location. As well, you can integrate with a knowledge base or a help desk ticketing system to associate your remote sessions with your other systems that you may have in place. We also include LDAP integration which allows you to connect to your existing account directory. So, instead of having to build a lot of manual accounts ... or manually build accounts within the Box, you can basically pull accounts from Active Directory or other LDAP directories. And, you can also apply group policies to those accounts so you don't have to assign privileges to the rep on a person-by-person basis.
And then, this provides some security benefits as well because it means that, if you have a rep that somehow leaves the company for some reason, when you delete him from Active Directory he's deleted from the Box and is unable to use the product. So, you don't have to go application to application to apply your security settings. The customization the product offers is from beginning to end. We include customization of the website. You can make it look exactly like your company website, same look and feel. We also include customization to the initial dialog boxes that the customers agree to and then some of the initial messages they get within their interface. And also, the exit survey as I mentioned earlier is completely customizable. The uninstall dialogue box is customizable as well.
What this rolls up into is that you can describe ... you can use these customization features to enhance your company's brand and then to present your company's messages throughout the course of the support session.
So, why BomgarTM? A few things. Foolproof ease of use. It's extremely simple for the rep and it's extremely simple for the customer. No one's scratching their head trying to figure out how to get connected to a customer with BomgarTM. And this translates into greater adoption for your reps and greater adoption for your customers, and less time spent monkeying around trying to get connected, and more time spent actually supporting the customer. The cost of the solution is much lower. You don't have monthly fees. You will save over time, just a matter of when.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
The security stance with the Box allows it to be easily deployed into a security sensitive environment without additional configurations or without additional hardening or auditing. We also include integration functionality that allows you to integrate the solution to your existing processes, your existing systems, and to your existing customer strategy. And with that, I'm going to turn it back over to John for our question and answer session.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Thank you Nathan and thank you Malcolm for that great information. All of you listening, if you have any questions you'd like answered go ahead and submit those. If we don't have time to answer all of them on the webcast, I promise we will follow up with you very quickly following the web cast.
Well, as I suspected, people are interested in security. And Malcolm, I think that you definitely piqued some people's interest in your talk about HIPAA compliance. So, our first question comes from Mark and he wants to know how you can assure that there are no HIPAA violations when the support staff is remotely connecting to a user screen because they could be displaying patient data. How do you approach that?
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
Right, right. Well, first of all, the HIPAA privacy laws that came out are regulations that came out in 2003 require that any company that is doing business with a doctor's office or dealing with patient data has to sign a ... have to form a business associate agreement with that practice. So, all of our customers fall into that category so we have a business associate agreement with all of those ... with our customers. The business associate agreement basically states that we're aware of HIPAA, we know what it's about, we've trained our employees, and that the information ... and that they can send data to us ... patient confidential data to us and that we have to make user that we protect it just with the same standards that they're required to protect it. So, when one of our reps connects to a customer that has patient data on the screen, it is not in HIPAA violation because we already have an agreement with them and we're treating the patient data as we should according to HIPAA.
So, if someone else would walk into that office that didn't have any kind of relationship to that practice and looked at that data, then that would be a HIPAA violation. Secondly, in relation to a hosted site, see one of the issues that we had with the hosted solution was that the data that our support rep is looking at that's confidential is being routed to a server at the hosted facility and we don't know if that ... how they're treating that data; if they're caching it at all, how ... they have to decrypt it from the customer's side and they have to re-encrypt it as they send it to us. So, that's a little bit fuzzy and it would be ... the owner should be on us to make sure that the hosted solution was following HIPAA protocol. And, we didn't want to have a ... set up an agreement with the hosted facility. So, hence our choice to use the Bomgar BoxTM. I hope that answered your question.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Yeah, thanks Malcolm. Nathan, the next question is for you. You mentioned that you would be picking up support for Vista later in January, and we have the question, "What about older versions of Windows, such as Windows 95, do you start expiring those as you support new ones?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
We currently go all the way back to 95. We decided to skip DOS but 95 through 2003 Server currently and then Vista coming up end of January.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Well, I think that probably helps a lot of IT people who are not always as quick to jump on the bandwagon as their providers would like. I have a couple of questions here on licensing. I'm going to ask them both together. Can I control access at the rep level and how many licenses can each Box hold?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Okay. I can take those and I don't know if you had any comments on that Malcolm but feel free to jump ...
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
No, go ahead.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
So, as to setting access privileges per rep, I'm assuming that's ... I'm answering the right way, it does allow you to do it per rep so you can have individual reps with individual sets of permissions for when they access a customer's PC. In addition to that, you can set group policies so you can have groups of reps who have certain privileges. For the second question, number of licenses that a Box can hold, we have two different appliance models. One is our B200 model which is the smaller model and it'll go up to 25 concurrent sessions. So, 25 reps supporting 25 remote PCs. And then, we have a larger B300 model as well which will go up to 400 concurrent sessions. So, 400 reps supporting 400 remote PCs.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Wow. So, do you help them understand at the beginning how many concurrent licenses they're likely to need?
Nathan McNeill VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
That's right. We'd work with the customer prior to purchase.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Okay. This next question, again for Nathan, and you answered this at the end of your presentation but I'm going to ask it again because I mentioned it as a way of differentiating the different providers. I have some customers on a Mac operating system. Do you support Mac? And, I know that you said that you do support Mac but I'd also like to ask how prevalent do you think Mac is and why is it important for people to offer it?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Well, I think that Mac is extremely important both now and as it continues to grow in the marketplace. Now, it is extremely important for our education customers primarily, and with different educational institutions it can go all the way up to 30, even 50%, of the PCs that they support ... or the computers they support are running Mac OS X. So, it's a big contingent there. In addition to that, a lot of corporations, and probably your own corporation if you looked hard enough, you'll have a few Mac computers that are off in a corner somewhere and either they're trying to support themselves or having a really hard time getting the right support from their support department. So, Mac is already a factor, especially for home users, and then I think we've seen growth in the marketplace as well with Mac OS X operating systems. So, their market share, I think, is increasing so we want to keep a ... maintain support for that operating system as it grows.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
You mentioned a feature that I thought was really interesting; that you actually do a screen capture of the session that you can review later. And, I'm curious, Malcolm, have you used that feature? It sounds like a great way to also do quality control for some of the tech support calls.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
It is. And, we ... although we haven't used it yet, that is a feature that we are interested in. The first version of BomgarTM didn't have it, or the version that we were on a year ago didn't have it when we first bought it. but now, we've updated to the latest version and it's something we haven't used yet. There's been a lot of discussion within our tech support group about how best to use it and so we also need to make sure that we're complying with, you know, if we want to save these recordings from a HIPAA standpoint we want to make sure we have the procedures in place so that we're very careful handling that.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Well, it's another area that we find our spending survey that our members are planning on spending on next year is some of the quality monitoring software which does include that screen capture ability. So, I didn't realize that was included in remote support so I was really glad to hear that you have that. It sounds like a great feature to have.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
I look at it from two standpoints. Primarily from an auditing standpoint that you can really be conclusive about what happened during session and what didn't. and also, from a training standpoint. You can use the recorded sessions to train reps or to show customers how to do something for later.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
So, we have a question here that comes up every time we do a webcast about remote support. I don't think it's possible to discuss this topic without talking about ports. So, what ports do I need to configure in order to use the Box?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
You can go ahead Malcolm.
Malcolm Hooper, Operations Manager, Practice Partner:
Well, I was going to say in our case we had ... it's using port 443 and we didn't have to ... because our firewall allowed for port 443 to come in we didn't have to configure anything. Maybe some sites have a more restricted outbound policy and that's ... I'll turn that over to Nathan.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Yeah, usually for the rep and also for the customer there's zero firewall configuration because it is using only outbound ports, outbound web ports. So, the only ports that you'd use to access, like a banking site, or a regular web page. Now, when you're first configuring the Box, you'd normally install it in a DMZ and then you would configure ports 443 and 80 to forward to the Box, but that's only for the initial configuration and again it's usually relatively simple to get that up and running.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Okay, our next question comes from John. Does your system allow the use of proprietary service diagnostic tools or is it limited to desktop sharing?
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
We are going to be working on some additional diagnostic tools. Currently we do allow you to do a couple of special keys that you can kind of control and delete or open the start menu with a shortcut and then on down the road we would be including some additional diagnostic tools. A lot of the stuff though, once you're in a remote control session, you have access to all the diagnostic tools inherent in Windows or Mac so it would just be more of a shortcut versus an additional capability.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
All right. Here is the license question I kind of meant to ask earlier and I asked the wrong one. Do I need a BomgarTM license for each of my support reps? So, I think we're talking about named user versus concurrent user licensing.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
Sure, and the answer is it depends. It depends on what your utilization will be. I mean, if you have an extremely active support center where people are on the phone with customers virtually 100% of the time, then it may be close to a one to one ratio. Now, with BomgarTM as opposed to many of our competitors, it is concurrent licensing based on the concurrent number of reps that are using the appliances versus per seat licensing which is based on the number of accounts you have. We see multiple advantages of this for our customers. One is simply that you don't necessarily have to have a license for each and every support rep you have. If you have people who only use the product occasionally, you can let them build an account and then give them access to those concurrent licenses.
Nathan McNeill, VP of Product Management, BomgarTM:
It also has some security benefits in that you normally, if you're using a product that doesn't allow concurrent licensing, you're using per seat licensing, you end up doing generic accounts like, you know, Support Rep 1 and Support Rep 2. What that translates into is that you're not really sure who exactly did the support session and who didn't. Whereas, concurrent licensing you can create a larger number of accounts and tie that, at a one to one ratio, to the people that are actually using the product. So, it provides some security benefits as well as some cost benefits to our customers.
John Ragsdale, VP of Research, SSPA:
Well, it appears that we are at the top of the hour so I think that's all the time we have today. If we didn't get to your question in the Q&A period, I promise we will follow up with you very quickly after the webcast to get that information. So, on behalf of the SSPA I would like to thank Malcolm Hooper from Practice Partner and Nathan McNeill from BomgarTM for joining me today. Thanks everybody for tuning in and I hope we will see you here at our next SSPA webcast. Have a great day.