As business practices evolve and the workforce becomes increasingly remote, it is important that managed services providers (MSPs) make the most of the remote support tools currently available. Today, the market is growing every day, which makes choosing the right solutions more difficult.
Finding the tools that can meet your specific requirements and help you face the challenges associated with supporting clients remotely requires a significant amount of research. To help you in your search, this article outlines the major challenges faced by MSPs delivering remote support services to clients and recommends the best support tools to overcome these hurdles.
The challenges for supporting clients remotely
Delivering effective, accurate, and timely customer support should be a priority for every organization—but it is especially crucial for MSPs. The average customer’s expectations of customer support services are growing due to the rise of customer service chatbots and remote access support. When done right, these services allow companies to solve a majority of problems in under an hour—or even in just a few minutes.
If you hope to stay competitive, they need to be able to match these customer expectations in a way that is convenient for their clients. As technology becomes increasingly advanced and the market becomes more and more competitive, MSPs are continuously challenged to provide a wider range of support methods. Offering remote IT support is an extremely effective and popular way to address customer issues from any location. Effective remote support can decrease response time, save money, increase productivity, and bring a whole slew of other benefits.
It is key to be aware of the challenges associated with providing remote IT support services—and how these can be tackled. One of the challenges is the need to make the ticketing experience as simple as possible for clients. To do this, you should implement processes and safeguards that reduce friction. The goal should be to help ensure your processes make managing support tickets fast and easy. This usually involves prioritizing tickets according to the degree of urgency and helping teams find information they need to solve issues fast via a robust documentation strategy. Many IT support or help-desk services also provide a way to create a customer-facing knowledge base, which helps reduce the number of tickets submitted by clients.
Another challenge businesses face in remote support is managing and supporting continuous backups. Every organization needs to create backups to protect themselves from data loss. This is especially important for MSPs, because they are likely to manage data on behalf of numerous clients. Customer data loss can have a critical impact on your customer’s bottom line, your company’s brand reputation, and may even result in legal liability. To reduce the risk of data being lost, it is critical you use a dependable backup solution. At some point, effective support will rely on your ability to remotely access the last working copy of your machines—and MSPs should ensure a robust backup solution is in place before disaster strikes.
On the subject of data security, effective password management has also increased in importance as cybercrime becomes more advanced. Maintaining a password management solution is key to protecting your customers against a growing number of threats. Without the right tools, you make both your company and your clients vulnerable to attack. You need to be able to safely store and manage user access, passwords, and relevant documentation remotely. Additionally, your password management solution should offer one-click access to the appropriate services so techs can solve issues fast.
The best remote support tools
Luckily, there are a number of tools that can help tackle the aforementioned challenges. To start building your tool kit, here are a few of our top recommendations.
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For attended and unattended remote access: N-able® Take Control
N-able Take Control is a tool no IT service provider should be without. This tool lets technicians solve problems whether the end user is at the keys or not—and it’s designed to be easy to use to enable MSPs to support more clients. Take Control gives you access to deep diagnostics via a single dashboard, and connects to devices in seconds. It is built to fit with your technicians’ workflows so your software can adjust to you, rather than the other way around.
Take Control allows you to hit the ground running, but it is also an extremely flexible product. It can be customized to suit your specific needs, letting you configure workflows and design reports built with your customers in mind. The system also supports custom branding so you can deliver a fully branded and cohesive experience to your clients.
It’s also vital you have crystal-clear visibility into client devices and their associated information. Take Control offers high-resolution visibility, as well as the ability to control quality via chat transcript searches and full session recordings. A free trial is available here.
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For creating remote backups: N-able Backup
It is crucial to be able to create fast backups in—and restores from—the cloud. N-able Backup lets you easily save users’ data and remotely restore the last working copy of a machine, server, or dataset. The software can create backups for servers, workstations, documents, and Microsoft 365. It features bare metal and virtual disaster recovery and is able to reduce maintenance windows and optimize cloud-based backup for minimal downtime.
N-able Backup also takes a security-focused approach to storage. This includes using global certified data centers, regional data storage, and AES 256-bit data encryption. The centralized dashboard is easy to use, includes private cloud storage, facilitates rapid data transfers, and gives you access to multiple recovery methods. Overall, this backup solution is ideal for MSPs providing remote support.
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For password management: N-able Passportal
N-able Passportal gives MSPs the ability to store and manage all user access, passwords, and documentation. This tool offers an ideal solution to the challenge of maintaining client security during remote support activities. It also allows you to access documentation management capabilities to help standardize service delivery. Passportal was created to streamline a technicians’ day by giving them instant access to client knowledge and accounts via a single console.
Passportal helps you employ password management best practices and stores credentials and knowledge in an encrypted vault. To enable to rest easy, access to the fault is secured with multifactor authentication (MFA) and role-based permissions. To learn more, request a demo today.
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For a remote monitoring tool: Remote Monitoring and Management & N-central®
N-able offers two options of remote monitoring and management solutions—N-able RMM and N-able N-central. Both solutions offer remote monitoring, remote control, remote network access, device management (including mobile). You can access both RMM and N-central from nearly anywhere. Both tools are built with power and security in mind—but there’s likely to be one solution that suits the needs of your specific MSP better. To help you decide which solution is for you, here are some key differentiating factors.
If you need a remote monitoring solution to get started, N-able RMM can help you get up and running almost immediately. RMM gives you access to a comprehensive set of tools, helping you secure, maintain, and improve your clients’ IT systems. This software includes out-of-the-box monitoring templates, fast and safe remote access, patch management, managed antivirus, and much more—everything you need to get started, as well as the things you’ll need as you continue to grow. To see for yourself, a free trial is available here.
On the other hand, if you’re a large IT business or multi-site enterprise that has outgrown your previous remote monitoring solution, N-central is likely the software for you. This tool is a highly scalable and customizable remote monitoring and management solution that offers layered automation capabilities. It features built-in antivirus and web protection, backup and recovery, PSA integrations, rapid remote control, multiple add-on security services, and an on-premises operations option if you need it. You can access a free trial here.
Choosing the best remote support software for you
Business practices are constantly evolving, and it continues to become more important to be able to easily support their customers from a distance. To tackle the challenges associated with remote support, you need access to scalable, dependable, and advanced tools that can help them deliver remote support that is secure, consistent, and efficient. Your brand reputation and the satisfaction of your clients depends on it. No matter the remote support challenges , these products can help.
Get More on Remote Support Tools
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