As applications, networks, and the general IT environment increase in complexity, the challenge for help desks everywhere is to continue delivering effective and timely solutions through the most efficient means possible. Remote Assistance enables an employee to grant permission for someone (such as a technician, an administrator, or a similar expert) to view or take control of their computer in a secure way for a limited, preset period of time. Remote Assistance combines computer control, text chat, voice chat, and file sharing, all in one simple-to-use interface. The Helpdesk call center technician can use this feature to resolve problems as if the technician were actually sitting in the employee’s chair. And because of the chat options in Remote Assistance, a technician and employee do not need to remain connected on the phone to communicate verbally.

The Remote Assistance feature is built in to Windows XP Professional, so custom development to enable the technology is not needed. Instead, Microsoft chose to focus its resources on developing the processes that technicians would use to assist employees effectively.

The Microsoft Helpdesk had experience in using remote diagnostics with employees before Remote Assistance. For three years before the deployment of Remote Assistance, Helpdesk used Microsoft NetMeeting to gain access to the employee’s computers to see and solve problems. Although NetMeeting was highly effective at helping to reduce the time to close a service request, technicians must first ensure that the user has the software installed.

Because Remote Assistance requires that both the employee and technician use Windows XP Professional on their desktops, Microsoft made the rollout of Remote Assistance part of the overall Windows XP Professional internal deployment by default. The Microsoft IT deployment team created training sessions for the Helpdesk trainers, who, in turn, trained all the technicians at the global call centers on when it was appropriate to use Remote Assistance and how to most effectively use it. Although the training sessions were effective, most technicians reported that an online training demonstration or briefing would have been sufficient because Remote Assistance is fairly intuitive. Also, to track Remote Assistance usage across Helpdesk, Microsoft IT created a method by which technicians could indicate in the service request tracking log database that they had used Remote Assistance to close a user help request.

The next step in the deployment was to enable the enterprise-wide Group Policy settings that would pre-configure employee computers to accept solicitations for Remote Assistance. The Microsoft IT security team reviewed and approved the Group Policy change because even though employees could be solicited for Remote Assistance, each employee still had to accept the request. After the Group Policy was deployed by Microsoft Directory Services group at the domain level, employees received the change to their configurations the next time they logged on to their computers.

Since the introduction of Remote Assistance into the Helpdesk environment, Microsoft IT has seen impressive gains in Remote Assistance usage to solve employee issues. Twelve weeks after its introduction to Helpdesk, more than 10 percent of all calls to the Helpdesk Call Centers throughout the world were resolved through Remote Assistance. Most importantly, client satisfaction for issues resolved through Remote Assistance increased overall from 94 percent to 98.5 percent, closing the gap by 75 percent.

Moreover, technicians found the Remote Assistance technology useful in dealing with employees where the language spoken by the technician was not the primary language of the employee, or where the employee’s technical aptitude created difficulty.

Some issues that Helpdesk encountered when implementing Remote Assistance in this way included: