Benefits of the Right Remote Monitoring & Troubleshooting (RMT) Solution to IT Support Teams

Synopsis

We are in an age where the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed organizations to adapt to remote working. L1, L2 and L3 support teams are some of the most affected by this change. We discuss why this situation impacts these support teams and how they need to adapt to run like a well-oiled machine, when working remotely.

MATRIX24x7 is an RMT platform that:

Helps solve more problems at L1 level.
Reduces back and forth communication for problem solving.
Enables rapid remediation through custom one-click commands.
Reduces time spent on recurring issues through automated troubleshooting.

A Background of L1, L2 and L3

Organizations break down their support team into three layers (L1, L2 and L3) in order to maintain a balance between the cost of operation and service levels. A major driver of this structure is that most support requests can be addressed by resources with very low technical expertise. As a result, the L1, L2 and L3 support teams demonstrate the following characteristics respectively.

Remote Working Aggravates Common Problems at Each Support Layer

Misleading Tickets
- When L1 encounters a problem outside their script, they communicate the problem to L2 with a ticket.
- The content of these tickets are misleading to the L2 support team due to lack of information.
- A lot of correspondence with the end user as well the L1 support engineer is required to resolve these.
- How Remote Working Aggravates the Problem
- Remote workers do not have access to the comms facilities available in their office premises.
- Even when they are available, accessing such solutions remotely is cumbersome.
- This has a toll on keeping up with SLAs.
- Better Ticket Accuracy with MATRIX24x7
- MATRIX24x7 integrates directly with your ticketing system.
- Automatically adds all the information about a device or software to a ticket with the snapshot of device status at the time issue occurred
- L2 and L3 support teams can jump start troubleshooting while greatly reducing the need for back and forth communication.
- Generate tickets to the correct support team, based on the type of issue; thus allowing the quick resolution of issues and increased customer satisfaction.
- Automated L1 ticket generation based on proactive monitoring of the system.
Lack of Information / Data
- After tickets are raised, L2 and L3 support teams need to have information at hand that enable them to perform RCA and troubleshoot efficiently.
- However, most such support teams in the world only have off-the-shelf RMT tools at hand, which provide fixed information and functionality.
- Certain teams are stuck with UEM (Unified Endpoint Management) software as their RMT solution. Please refer to our article on The Woes of a Fleet Support Engineer During a Pandemic for more details on why UEMs don’t cut it.
- How Remote Working Aggravates the Problem
- When teams work from the same location, they have the luxury of leveraging the experience and expertise of their colleagues easily, it is just a case of walking to the desk and talking it out.
- On the other hand, remote working is far more challenging, where teams struggle to communicate efficiently without visual aids and gestures.
- Therefore, it is essential to limit back and forth communication to obtain required information to identify the root cause of the problem, so that troubleshooting can commence.
- In depth / Relevant Data through MATRIX24x7
- The MATRIX24x7 platform eases and enables organizations to have access to scenario specific parameters critical to the efficiency of their RMT operation.
- Our RMT experts will analyze your information needs and make them all available through its single portal.
Lack of Control
- Once a root cause is identified, the next step is to troubleshoot.
- Off-the-shelf RMT platforms are very limited in terms of the actions that can be taken to remedy a problem.
- Available methods include sledgehammer techniques such as remote desktop and device restarts that disrupt the operation.
- As these approaches are disruptive to operations, support engineers are forced to trouble non-tech savvy end users or even worse, deploy tech support engineers to physically visit unattended devices to correct problems.
- How Remote Working Aggravates the Problem
- During a pandemic, deploying tech support engineers is an incredibly impractical task with all the lockdowns in motion.
- Apart from this, maintaining a conversation over domestic network and phone connections becomes difficult due to delays and interference.
- Granular, Purposeful Control through MATRIX24x7
- The MATRIX24x7 platform makes adding custom configurations and commands a breeze.
- Our RMT expert team will work with your teams to understand their wishlist in terms of remote control and configurability and work towards enabling such functionality through the platform.
Inability to Remain Fixated on a Monitoring Screen
- Support engineers who need to keep their eyes on a terminal or a display in order to stay on top of support tickets.
- This is possible while at your workplace.
- However, this changes during a remote work situation.
- How Remote Working Aggravates the Problem
- Support engineers are under a lot of tension whenever they are away from it even for a second.
- At the same time, being away for a short time is not something that can be fully avoided.
- This is a lose-lose situation for the organization as well the employee.
- The support engineer faces anxiety of failing to meet SLAs because he/she didn’t see the incident on time and the organization suffers the consequences.
- Multi-channel Alerting through MATRIX24x7
- MATRIX24x7 eliminates the need to spend every waking hour in front of the display.
- Have autonomous health rules to detect problems and notify the support team via your favourite medium.
Lack Of Enthusiasm In Dealing With Repetitive Tasks
- Repeating the same set of tasks over and over again will kill the enthusiasm of the support engineer.
- Negatively impacts the SLAs.
- High turnover of support personnel which is a strain on the support training team.
- How Remote Working Aggravates the Problem
- It is possible to lose attention to details and carry out the wrong rectification steps on the issue which could be detrimental.
- Further negatively impacts the SLAs.
- Health Rules and Self – Healing through MATRIX24x7
- Automated self – healing rules which will address known and recurring issues thus eliminating time wastage on such issues.
- Ability to fine tune the self – healing rules for recurring issues based on previous experiences.