Despite the headlines return to office (RTO) has been making, remote work and distributed workforces are here to stay. Case in point: a Robert Half report found that almost 9/10 workers considering a job change were interested in remote or hybrid roles1. For IT, that means solving the challenges of providing remote IT support for dispersed teams is a crucial part of the job.
Getting remote IT support right takes a combination of strategy, tactics, and tools that can vary significantly from team to team. In this article, we’ll explore the “what is remote support” topic in detail, including different types of remote IT support, common challenges, and practical tips for effective remote support.
What is remote IT support?
Remote IT support provides end users with support for IT systems and software without support personnel in the same physical location.
The basics of remote IT support are simple. Users are in location A, and technicians are in location B. Instead of deploying a technician to location A to solve a problem, the technician addresses it remotely.
Almost every organization that allows remote work and many organizations that have a distributed presence can benefit from remote IT support. The specific implementation details can vary widely across industries, teams, and organizations. For example, IT teams and MSPs supporting schools will have significantly different requirements than those supporting large enterprises.
Types of remote IT support
There are several different types of remote IT support and support models teams can implement, including:
- Internal support delivered by the same organization that uses the service (e.g., Acme Inc. IT supporting Exchange servers for Acme Inc.).
- External support involves a third party providing support for specific products or services (e.g., an MSP supporting a law firm’s network infrastructure).
- “Break/fix” support is narrowly focused on restoring functionality for previously operational systems, but doesn’t cover the deployment of new services or configurations.
- “White glove” support typically goes beyond break-fix and aims to minimize or reduce end-user effort.
The Importance of remote IT support
Remote IT support is a necessity given how modern businesses operate. Remote work and work from home (WFH) are the norm. Even organizations with a strong RTO push or those where most work gets done on-site are likely to have systems distributed across multiple locations.
On-site IT personnel everywhere a business has an IT footprint simply isn’t practical for most cases. For example, when you think about how to support remote employees, it’s clear that a technician at every location isn’t practical. As a result, remote support is essential to how organizations “keep the lights on”.
Benefits of remote IT support
Remote work offers employees opportunities and flexibility that wasn’t available when the vast majority of jobs were tied to your physical location. Similarly, remote IT support can deliver multiple business benefits. The sections below explain four key benefits of remote IT support.
Cost savings
Simply put, providing remote support is often a sound business decision. As any IT MSP will tell you, “truck rolls” — deploying a technician to a physical location — are tough to scale. Solving technical issues remotely can drastically reduce costs and make IT operations more efficient.
Talent acquisition and retention
People like working remotely. Organizations that lean into the remote work movement can attract talent who prefer the convenience of remote work. Additionally, a remote workforce enables organizations to distribute their workforce across the globe.
Improved MTTR
Remote IT support combined with remote access tools can drastically reduce a help desk’s mean time to resolve (MTTR) statistics. Instead of having the end user bring an endpoint device into the office or extended email chains or ticket comments, a technician can directly access problematic devices to resolve problems quickly.
More support coverage with less overhead
From an end-user perspective, 24/7 support coverage is great. However, around-the-clock coverage can be challenging for IT support. If technicians have to be in an office to provide support, the business has to have a physical office open 24/7. Additionally, a requirement to work from a specific physical location makes on-call coverage tougher on technicians. Being on call is one thing when you can work from anywhere with an internet connection. It’s another when you have to remain close enough to the office to make it in at the drop of a hat.
Challenges of remote IT support
Dispersed teams working remotely face challenges centralized teams don’t. Staying connected — both to the network and to your teammates — is harder, and you can’t just “walk over” to check on something. In the sections below, we’ll break down the 4 biggest remote IT support challenges for dispersed teams.
Hardware support and monitoring
Maintaining hardware uniformity and using traditional network monitoring protocols like SNMP is relatively easy when all your equipment is deployed in the same physical location and IT sources all the hardware. Remote work and BYOD make hardware support and monitoring significantly more challenging. When employees source their own devices and those devices are dispersed across multiple locations, legacy monitoring policies and uniform configuration guides aren’t practical.
Shadow IT
SaaS makes solving business problems with software easy. If you have a credit card and an email address, you can sign up for all sorts of useful tools. That also means it is very easy for well-intentioned users to implement unsupported solutions, increase shadow IT, and create additional IT risk in an organization. Monitoring shadow IT is particularly challenging when users are working remotely and may use the same device for personal and work tasks. For example, in our own shadow IT research, we’ve found that 67% of ChatGPT logins are from personal accounts.
Network connectivity and security
A legacy “castle-and-moat” approach to network security and connectivity could work for centralized teams. Protect and maintain the corporate network and strengthen the perimeter to ensure only authorized traffic enters or leaves the network, and you can keep the business running reasonably well. In practice, cloud apps, distributed workforces, and mobile devices make that approach impractical for most modern organizations.
IT must provide reliable and secure connectivity to organizational resources while supporting devices connecting from untrusted networks. Solutions like SASE are emerging to help address the need for more flexible and granular network security and connectivity.
Staffing appropriately
When your users work around the clock, they’ll want IT support around the clock. This reality creates an interesting staffing challenge for IT support managers. They need to ensure there are sufficient technicians working to support the business, without going over budget. Clearly defining service level agreements (SLAs) and hours of operation can help set expectations with stakeholders. From there, using tools like Erlang calculators can help IT strike the right balance between service level and cost.
6 tips for how to provide IT support for remote employees
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to providing effective remote IT support services. Your industry, SLAs, and business requirements will all influence what good looks like for your business. That said, there are many proven tactics and solutions for improving remote IT support quality. With that in mind, here are 9 tips to help organizations improve their remote IT support for dispersed teams.
#1 Find the support channels that work for your business
The way users contact IT can significantly influence IT support workflows, ticket queuing, and prioritization. Five of the most popular remote support channels are:
- Email– The argument for email as a remote support channel is simple: it’s ubiquitous. Even non-technical users will typically have and be capable of using email to contact you. It’s also asynchronous so you can avoid interrupts and still provide responsible response times.
- Phone- Phone calls are useful because they provide real-time synchronous feedback about the problem. All else equal, a call + screen share session can be one of the fastest ways to solve many issues remotely.
- Ticketing system- “Create a ticket” is one of the most common phrases from IT support pros. Invisible work is hard to measure and can throw off priorities. A ticketing system typically has some sort of portal front end (e.g., Jira Service Management, ZenDesk, SalesForce, or ServiceNow). Importantly, ticketing systems aren’t an “either/or” proposition with other remote IT support channels and teams can use them with other channels in this list.
- Chat- The numbers — such as Tidio reporting live chat as the most preferred customer service channel2 — typically suggest chat is one of the most convenient and efficient remote IT support channels for users. Live chat functions can be embedded as part of ticketing portals, websites, and remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools.
- Social media- In some cases, teams may provide support directly on social media platforms (e.g., X/Twitter replies, Facebook Communities, Spiceworks, etc.) and forums. This is tougher to track and standardize than other channels, but can be useful for product support and improving brand image.
Channels like chat and phone are great for users that want instant responses, but can be challenging to staff well, especially for smaller IT teams. If you’re struggling to get started with ticket tracking and organizing your requests, a ticketing system that supports “email to ticket” functionality and a user-facing portal is a good starting point. It gives IT a way to organize their work and users a familiar channel to communicate with IT.
💡Pro-tip: Enable self service where you can. Knowledge base articles and “how to” guides can help users solve their own problems without engaging IT. Including links to self-service documentation in the same places end users open tickets can meaningfully reduce IT tickets.
# 2 Set realistic SLAs, SLOs, and OLAs
Misaligned expectations are one of the biggest drivers of unnecessary support escalations. Remote IT support teams that set clear expectations and meet or exceed them can increase user satisfaction and reduce headaches for technicians. Three support key performance indicators (KPIs) that can help build shared understanding and set clear expectations with stakeholders are:
- Service level agreements (SLAs)- A contractual agreement between a provider and customer that defines criteria for the minimum allowable level of service. For example, an initial-response SLA may guarantee a support ticket is answered within 4 hours of creation.
- Service level objectives (SLOs)- Individual service targets such as an uptime metric of 99.9% or response time metric 2 hours. SLOs help IT support define specific targets for meeting SLAs or internal service targets.
- Operating level agreements (OLAs)- An internal agreement between internal departments (e.g., IT and development). OLAs can help teams define clear expectations for responses and reduce the risk of tickets getting “stuck” when issues are escalated to different teams. While practices like DevSecOps aim to reduce friction and increase collaboration between teams, handoffs and silos are still an IT support reality.
#3 Make prioritization part of the ticketing process
For individual users, their support ticket is the most important IT task at any point in time. For IT, it’s important to knock out urgent issues like service disruptions as fast as practical while still burning down the ticket backlog. Adding severity levels to tickets can help IT load balance and ensure they are focusing on the right work at the right time.
Defining P1-P4 severities is a good starting point. Users can specify a priority by default, and IT can override the priority based on ticket triage. Frameworks like Information Technology Infrastructure Library v4 (ITIL v4) can help mature organizations go deep, but a simple P1-P4 severity ranking may look something like this:
Defining these priorities in the context of your organization’s requirements can also help IT build reasonable escalation policies. For example, a P1 issue may get escalated if not resolved in 2 hours while a P4 issue may take weeks to escalate (or never auto-escalate).
#4 Ensure ticket creation is “frictionless”
If it is easier for users to get IT to do work outside of the ticketing system, that is what they’ll do. Internal IT support teams can typically enforce processes that help make ticketing the go-to method for getting support. For MSPs, the desire to provide world-class customer service for paying clients can make it easy to say yes “just this once” when a customer contacts you out-of-band to report an issue.
Fortunately, this problem has a relatively simple solution. Making creating a ticket the easy way to get help. As a rule of thumb, aim to make creating a ticket just as easy — or easier — than contacting support technicians directly.
#5 Detect and respond to issues before your users report them
Proactive issue resolution is one of the best ways to improve user satisfaction and reduce stress for your support engineers. For remote teams, being proactive means investing in the right tools and processes. Remote monitoring and management platforms can help IT detect and address many issues before a user notices. Additionally, effective endpoint monitoring allows IT to respond quickly when a remote endpoint experiences a potential performance or security issue.
#6 Deploy tooling to make remote IT support seamless
Tools aren’t everything, but they can make supporting dispersed teams easier. Deploying and using the right tools for your environment can make your technicians more efficient and reduce MTTR. Here are six categories of remote IT support tools to consider:
- Shared desktop/remote access – Frankly, you can’t beat shared desktop and remote access for solving many remote IT support problems for end users. It’s a fast, unambiguous, and reliable way to rule out PEBKAC and make sure IT isn’t missing something. Whether its native Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), VNC, or proprietary shared desktop and remote access tools (e.g., Splashtop, Logmein, TeamViewer, etc.), seeing the problem and getting “hands on” is an essential remote IT support capability.
- SaaS management- IT can use SaaS management platforms to create SaaS inventories, reduce SaaS waste, and provide IT visibility into what SaaS platforms are actually being used throughout an organization.
- RMM tools– Even before remote work was a business norm, MSPs needed to solve the remote IT support problem to scale their business. Remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools emerged to meet this need. RMMs include key remote management capabilities like remote access, automation, administrative tools (e.g., Task Manager), and remote software updates.
- NMS platforms– Network devices are the backbone of remote work and a key driver of end-user experience and productivity. Network management system (NMS) platforms help IT detect performance issues, manage network devices, and reduce reactive remote IT support work.
- Management networks, console servers, and IP KVM switches– If something is wrong with a device providing network access, you have a classic IT catch-22. Out-of-band management networks — such as a secondary ISP or 5G cellular network — can provide remote access to systems like console servers and IP-based keyboard, video, and mouse (KVM) switches so IT can remotely access a network-device’s CLI (command line interface) or server’s BIOS/UEFI screen even if the primary network is down.
- EDR software– Endpoint detection and response (EDR) software helps IT secure one of the weakest links in the cybersecurity chain: endpoint devices. Dispersed teams need to connect a wide range of endpoints operated by users with varying levels of cybersecurity knowledge and IoT devices that operate autonomously. EDR software can detect and contain threats before they spread and cause a cybersecurity incident.
Remote IT support FAQ
Why is remote IT support important?
Remote IT support helps organizations keep dispersed teams connected, secured, and productive.
What tools can I use for remote endpoint access?
RMM tools and remote desktop software are popular solutions for access and managing endpoints remotely.
How can I support network equipment remotely?
Network management system (NMS) platforms and hardware solutions like console servers, IP KVM switches, and OOB networks can streamline remote support for network devices.
How can organizations detect shadow IT when employees are remote?
SaaS management tools are one of the most accurate, scalable, and reliable ways to detect shadow IT.
Is it DNS?
Yes 😉
1 https://press.roberthalf.com/2023-02-21-The-State-of-Remote-Work-5-Trends-to-Know-for-2023
