Tech Support for the Home Office

More workers are being cut loose from the corporate support system when they work from home. Support.com has help

by Arik Hesseldahl

Ah, the dignity of working from home. You pick your own brand of coffee, you set the rules on what constitutes appropriate workplace attire, you can play the background music you like, and best of all, there's no commute.

But what happens when the PC acts up, crashes, gets infected with a virus, or experiences some other productivity-sapping trouble? Worse, what happens if the PC acts up and it belongs to you and not the company you work for?

Your Computer, Your Problem

Chances are increasing that in the above scenario, you'll be on your own. A recent report by market researcher Gartner (IT) suggests that by next year, 20% of large companies will require those employees who work from home to buy their own notebook computer. And the more senior your position, the higher the chances—as high as 50% if you're in the C-suite—that you'll be doing as much as 80% of your work on a PC you bought yourself.

And more often than not, what the company doesn't buy and set up, the company doesn't support. That will leave more employees stuck finding their own help when computer trouble strikes. Rather than sending corporate tech staff to an employee's home—a costly proposition—chances are, companies will instead give remote workers an allowance and ask them to seek out their own computer help, Gartner says.

Anthony Rodio would like to be the guy they call. He's a senior vice-president at support.com, a division of SupportSoft (SPRT), a Redwood City (Calif.) concern that for 10 years has helped large companies automate their PC support functions. When the PC acts up, support.com uses the Internet to conduct an automated scan to detect, diagnose, and correct any problems. Support.com recently the new service at the DEMO 2007 conference.

Remote Diagnostics

Aimed primarily at frustrated consumers, support.com is catching the eye of home workers, road warriors, and the like, who might otherwise turn to calling Best Buy's (BBY) Geek Squad or go the ever-frustrating route of calling their PC or software vendor for help. The trouble is, most people don't have a clue whether the difficulty they're having is a software or hardware problem. "We've found that on average consumers will spend as much as 12 hours a month struggling to get their computers to work the way they want," Rodio says. "That's like losing half your weekend."

Support.com's approach to the dreaded PC support call is simple: When the PC acts up, you call support.com, where a technician based in Syracuse, N.Y.—not India—answers your call and asks a few questions. From there, they ask you to go to a Web address that enables support.com to remotely connect to your PC. With your permission, they take control of your PC long enough to perform a software scan that checks the usual places where problems typically crop up.

The scan is modeled on the same remote diagnostic and repair tools that SupportSoft's corporate customers use, and they're not exactly small potatoes. Before it sold its PC units to Lenovo, IBM (IBM) deployed SupportSoft tools on its ThinkPad line of notebook PCs sold to corporate customers. Time Warner Cable (TWX) uses SupportSoft tools to help customers of its RoadRunner cable modem service. Other customers include Procter & Gamble (PG), 3M (MMM), Sony (SNE), and Bank of America (BAC).