By Charles Cook, (Product Manager, Global Services)
When I was an IT program manager, in a previous life, there was always tremendous competition to work on IT projects that created new capabilities. The company wanted IT to focus on projects that would help grow the business, but we also had the critical responsibility of maintaining a high level of workstation and infrastructure support. The problem is it was almost impossible to try and find time to do both.
Today, as a Services Product Manager at Dell, I continue to hear that solving this problem is a top priority for our customers. In fact, the challenge has become even greater as IT shops deal with the increased complexity that comes with a proliferation of personal devices in the workplace and the need for mobility. IDC reports that IT continues to spend 80% of their time, on routine operations and support, leaving only 20% for innovation and strategic projects. To help shift this trend, our Services team has launched a new offer that dramatically reduces support time and costs, while freeing up time for IT to focus on solving business problems.
ProSupport Plus for PCs and tablets is the only truly complete support service for PCs and tablets. The service includes 24/7 priority access to our highly rated ProSupport engineers for hardware and software support, plus industry-first proactive and predictive technology. Our SupportAssist technology proactively monitors your PCs and tablets and notifies Dell when there is a hardware or software issue. If an issue is detected, the software automatically creates a case, gathers the relevant device information, checks for entitlement and phones home to Dell tech support. Our Dell ProSupport engineers then proactively contact you to quickly resolve the issue. This process represents a new paradigm in device support, which until now, has been a completely reactive process.
Dell’s proactive support model is fast, automated and dramatically reduces IT effort to resolve issues. In independent testing, it was found that resolving an issue with ProSupport Plus with SupportAssist resulted in up to 58% fewer steps and up to 84% less time on the phone with tech support versus HP and Lenovo.* ProSupport Plus with SupportAssist can also prevent downtime by predicting potential issues before they become a problem. Imagine a situation where your hard drive is about to fail, but you are warned first by Dell so you have time to back up your data. A new hard drive arrives in the mail the next business day, you restore your data, and are quickly back up and running—averting a major problem. That is the type of “wow” customer experience that we will be delivering with ProSupport Plus and you can only get it from Dell.
By now, I hope you are as excited about this new offer as we are. But it gets even better because we have also included two other essential services—accidental damage repair and hard drive retention. We listened to you, and these two services are by far the most highly valued additional support services. Having coverage to protect your devices from drops, spills and surges and the ability to keep the old hard drive post-replacement, provides investment protection and gives you control over your data. For customers with more than 1000 ProSupport Plus systems, Dell also provides a dedicated Technical Account Manager for escalation management and service history reporting. We bundled these essential services to ensure that ProSupport Plus is the most complete offer for PCs and tablets. Learn more about how your organization can benefit from Dell ProSupport Plus at www.Dell.com/ProSupportPlus
*Based on Nov 2014 Principled Technologies Test Report commissioned by Dell. Actual results will vary. Full report. SupportAssist not available on Venue 7 and 8 tablets.