Last updated: April 6, 2022
IT service providers usually face a fundamental challenge. Ideally, many different companies are served by IT technology and supported by the hotline. However, while an IT technician who can be directly on site and get an up-to-date picture of the IT network and the problems, a hotline that has no direct contact with the IT network has to rely on additional information.
It is important that this information does not contain estimates or assumptions, but facts. With professional IT documentation such as Docusnap, this is no problem. If IT problems occur in a company, there are several ways to solve them. One way would be that the internal IT department, if present and not just represented by a single IT contact, can of course isolate the problem and ideally fix it themselves.
Outsourcing is popular
In some companies, however, it is not always the case that an IT department is available throughout the year. Then, in an emergency, a reliable partner must step in quickly to pinpoint the problem and come up with a solution as soon as possible.
If the customer and the contractor are quite close to each other, and this is meant in the truest sense of the word, i.e. there is only a short physical distance between them, it certainly makes sense to send an IT technician directly to the site.
However, this will relatively rarely be the case, so it naturally makes sense to operate your own IT hotline for such cases. This way, the first contact with the customer is naturally established much faster and a problem analysis can already take place during the first calls. But we won’t even discuss the advantages of an IT hotline operated by the IT service provider here.
Known problems of the hotline staff
A good IT hotline employee must be able to do several things. He must be able to get a picture of what is happening with relatively little information and isolate the problem. But what is missing in many cases is precise information about the IT network.
Even if the client can provide a lot of details about the problem and the network, this information should always be treated with a certain degree of caution. If errors occur in this type of information transfer, it can make problem solving much more difficult. But everyone who has ever worked in a hotline department knows this too.
Of course, it is possible to get the necessary information in this way. And with the option of remote maintenance, the hotline employee can also access a wide range of information. But the overall view is still lacking and, above all, the more precise the information retrieval has to be, the more time is needed.
Docusnap delivers relevant data with the latest status at the push of a button
Ideally, before any IT incident, an inventory would be taken to see what is actually going on in the network. In an emergency, however, hardly anyone has the time, let alone the understanding for the effort involved.
With Docusnap, however, this is exactly what is possible. With the Ultimate version, IT service providers can use Docusnap to provide their customers with an automated inventory of all components of the customer’s IT network at intervals that can be defined at will, and to retrieve the inventory immediately if necessary. Since this type of inventory not only covers hardware, but also operating systems and programs, comprehensive information is made available to the IT hotline.
This not only makes it easier to isolate the problem, but also saves a lot of time in an emergency. And with it, the time it takes to restore the network to a normal state. The customer will thank you.
Since emergency manuals, restart, topology and network plans are also provided, the hotline can draw from the full resources.
Connecting Docusnap and your hotline application
Docusnap is not a closed system. On the contrary. With the help of Docusnap Connect, Docusnap users can prepare specific data in the Docusnap interface (hierarchical structure), reuse it (concepts) or export it for further use. The data can be exported to an SQL or MySQL database or saved as an XML, CSV or Ecxel file.
This makes it possible to access the provided data by means of existing software without having to call Docusnap additionally. Thus, nothing stands in the way of individual customization, and it greatly simplifies the process of obtaining information about the customer’s network environment.
More efficiency, less costs for you and the customer.
With Docusnap and the always up-to-date information available with it, problems can be isolated much faster. As a result, the hotline can devote itself to the actual problem as quickly as possible. This in turn has a very positive effect on the customer as well, since the company can return to normal operations much more quickly.
And to make sure that all your questions about installation, setup and connectivity can already be answered during this phase, we offer you full support from our team of experts for these 30 days as well. Also completely free of charge.