e4e is a leader in next generation business services for clients in the U.S., U.K. and India, offering end-to-end mortgage services, remote infrastructure management and healthcare services. As part of its offering, e4e provides remote technical support for clients’ customers all over the world. Established in 2000 in Santa Clara, California, e4e now has over 5,000 experienced service delivery professionals and several Fortune 100 clients. e4e supports three global service delivery centers. In the U.S. they are located in Phoenix, AZ and Baltimore, MD, in the U.K., Glasgow, and in India they are located in Bangalore, Chennai and Pune.

The Challenge: Improve Customer Satisfaction with Better Troubleshooting

e4e provides remote technical support to the end users of its own customers, who range from tech-savvy people to consumers at home. The company found that it was very tough to troubleshoot PCs and other IT systems remotely. e4e’s customer support representatives (CSRs) spent most of their time inquiring about system details from a customer, rather than resolving the problem.

It was often difficult to determine software versions and system settings over the phone. Once the problem was identified, it was often time-consuming to resolve it because the CSR guided the customer through the troubleshooting process verbally. More often than not, this caused confusion rather than fixing the problem, because the customer was unable to clearly communicate the information required by the CSR. As a result, calls were taking a long time to resolve and impacting customer satisfaction. “The average time to handle a customer issue was very high,” according to Krishna Kumar, head of technology at e4e.

Implementing Citrix GoToAssist for Remote Assistance

e4e experimented with several products to help it combat this problem. However, these remote applications did not provide the right features to meet e4e’s requirements. As part of a pilot program, e4e tested Citrix® GoToAssist™ on a few customer support computers. The CSRs found the technology platform extremely useful. With a successful pilot proving its utility, e4e deployed GoToAssist for its remote technical troubleshooting division. “We were looking for a solution that was essentially lightweight and would not be bandwidth-intensive, to keep costs down. We found Citrix’s GoToAssist had the functionality we required and was user-friendly,” said Kumar.

Gain Complete Information for Resolving Issues

e4e handles the technical support for many different products, and a call often requires a support person to directly configure system settings or access hidden system files. With the help of GoToAssist, a CSR can now access a customer’s desktop and troubleshoot it as if it were his or her own. For example, using the Remote Diagnostic tools, the CSR can check the system configuration and gather details for the development team. Without GoToAssist, accessing hidden system files was next to impossible.

With the customer’s permission, the CSR can also use remote viewing and control to view and share control of the customer’s computer to resolve issues visually. With remote control, diagnosing the issue is easy, and fixing the problem is even easier. The patented compression technology of GoToAssist enables the CSR to provide real-time support to all customers, even while connected to customers overseas. Rather than spending time verbally instructing the customer, the CSR can manually fix the problem.

Reduce Call Handling Time by 50 Percent

GoToAssist has increased productivity during a call significantly. “With GoToAssist, we found that calls that previously took about 30 to 45 minutes to handle could now be resolved in just 10 to 15 minutes,” said Kumar. After deploying GoToAssist, e4e has seen the average call handling time drop by an estimated 50 percent. This means that a CSR can be more productive by handling more customers, thus increasing the company’s customer satisfaction and profitability.

Increase Rate of First Call Resolution

Before deploying GoToAssist, several phone calls might have been required to accurately solve one issue. “Now the rate of resolution of an issue in the first call itself is higher,” said Kumar. According to the CSRs at e4e, GoToAssist is ideal for resolving difficult issues. If a customer’s problem is not solved though a regular phone call, GoToAssist can be employed for troubleshooting, which often allows the CSR to avoid escalating the call to another agent.

Thanks to the deployment of GoToAssist, e4e CSRs have found that, in many cases, a support phone call is no longer needed. The support conversation can happen over chat through ChatLink, which in most cases turns out to be faster, reduces bandwidth and provides a more effective communication method. Through chat, it is easier than ever to transfer patch files, push out URL addresses and avoid language barriers and miscommunication.

Increase Customer Satisfaction Significantly

e4e’s mission is to delight their client’s customers as their own, and GoToAssist has helped increase customer satisfaction. “Another benefit we have seen is that our customer satisfaction rating has gone up by a point. So, if on a scale of 1 to 5, we used to score 3, we now score 4,” said Kumar. Because of the company’s increased customer satisfaction levels with GoToAssist, e4e has seen growth in business. It is now deploying more licenses of GoToAssist to help handle more customers.

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