The help desk needs an update and video is its killer new feature

Credit: Victor1558 via Flickr

Many companies are hoping to capitalize on the BYOD and mobile-first trends by encouraging their workers to become self-supporting rather than relying on the traditional help desk and desktop support model. Encouraging self-support is a great idea and has the potential to reduce support and IT costs as well as to increase employee productivity and satisfaction -- both of which go hand in hand with the overall aims of BYOD and enterprise mobility.

Users can take many questions and device-related issues to an Apple Genius Bar, Best Buy Geek Squad, a manufacturer's support line, or even to their tech-savvy friends instead of to the corporate help desk. 

The move to self-support hasn't gone unnoticed by IT leaders or vendors. During a conversation earlier this year, MobileIron CEO Ojas Rege pointed out to me that the corporate help desk, which has been the first place to call with technology problems for decades, is gradually becoming the technology resource of last resort for workers in many companies.

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None of this means that the help desk and related support teams are going to disappear completely. There are often company-specific aspects to user and device support/management -- corporate network access, integration with internal resources like file shares or SharePoint sites, and restrictions imposed by IT to comply with industry or government regulations -- that outside agents simply aren't aware of or know how to support. Another major stumbling block is that companies that span multiple sites or multiple continents tend to have large numbers of employees that don't have immediate access to a mobile shop setup at headquarters or at flag-ship locations.

Still, the helpdesk can be re-imagined for the 21st century. In fact, getting beyond the idea of the help desk as a phone number to call is critical to efficiency and effectiveness. In the last decade, that process started with email addresses and a web portals that let users report issues without waiting on hold -- more recently texting and other forms of messaging have joined these earlier solutions. The ability for help desk agents to use remote desktop tools to take control of PCs remotely expanded on that trend significantly and greatly reduced the need to assign desktop techs to handle many minor issues.

So how can companies move forward in a way that encourages self-support, particularly for BYOD devices?

One surprising yet powerful candidate is video.

Video -- be it calling, chatting, or conferencing -- has proven effective in almost every business or academic niche. Remote collaboration, meetings that include attendees spread all over the globe, remote teaching or training, sales presentations and contract negotiation with far off clients, and even diagnosis and treatment protocols for remote or understaffed hospitals. Why can't those advantages be brought to the corporate help desk and related services?

Despite having heard arguments for video as a support mechanism for a while now, I remained a bit of a skeptic until this week.

The power of video as a support tools was made evident to me this week when I used Apple's FaceTime to talk to my dad instead of a phone call Christmas morning.

It wasn't the first time I'd used FaceTime (or Skype or another video chat product), but it was the first time my dad had used anything of the sort on his iPhone. Excited by this futuristic event (my dad is a 76 year old die hard Start Trek fan), he asked me how to take a picture of the chat to show it to one of my aunts whose only experience of the Internet was in the nineties via Microsoft's WebTV (now called MSN TV).