September/October 2001

Price: Starts at $325 per agent/seat per month, plus a one-time implementation fee of $675 (volume discounts are available). No additional charges for the number of sessions or number of customers serviced.

RATINGS (05)
Installation: 5
Documentation: 4.75
Features: 4.75
GUI: 4.25
Overall: A-

Of course, nowadays, most people know what a mouse is, but there still are many users who could use a little more assistance in troubleshooting their PCs. Well, as luck would have it, there is a solution that allows a helpdesk technician to see the user's screen to remotely diagnose problems quickly -- which results in less stress for the technician and a higher customer satisfaction level for the user. Called DesktopStreaming from Expertcity, this product allows the customer to be put into an ACD-like queue and text chat with helpdesk technicians, as well as remotely share the user's screen and even the agent's screen, which is useful for training purposes. DesktopStreaming is a complete ASP support system and because it is Web based, there is no software to install on end-user machines. The technology is application independent and supports all major platforms including Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac.

INSTALLATION
Expertcity e-mailed us with instructions on how to install their product. The e-mail contained a .ZIP file with the actual agent/helpdesk technician software application as well as URL hyperlinks to training and user manuals. They also sent us a test Web link that contained a sample Web page with a "Click Here" (for help) button and a text field for entering a technical question. This Web page's source code can be used as a template for adding "click for help" buttons throughout your Web site.

We extracted the HelpAlert application from the .ZIP file and just placed it on our desktop for easier access. We ran the application, which prompted us for a user name and password (provided by Expertcity). After logging in, we were presented with the agent's main interface for helping out customers. Essentially that was all that was required to install and execute the application, which resulted in a perfect 5 Installation rating.

DOCUMENTATION
The documentation was pretty good, and consisted of a few manuals, each containing a plethora of screenshots and arrows with caption text to describe various elements. A table of contents was available in the "Training Guide." Also, each manual contained step-by-step instructions for performing various tasks. Overall, we were quite pleased with the documentation.

FEATURES
DesktopStreaming supports chat using Expertcity's Java ChatLink technology. If the solution requires full remote assistance, the support rep can launch ScreenSharing to see the customer's screen. The agent can also transfer files to the customer using the same firewall-friendly protocol that powers ScreenSharing (not traditional FTP). Pushing Web pages is also available with this product.

The Management option provides access to detailed information on all of your representatives. You can drill down to find specific information about individual representative responses to questions, session success statistics, and representative ratings and performance. These reports enable you to research the history of each representative and to provide text for auto-response options.

Some of the Management options include:

• View a ChatLink Session Transcript: Use this feature to view support session transcripts;
   
• View Representative Details: Used to get a quick view of a representative's ratings and total sessions;
   
• View Representative Ratings History: To review a representative's ratings for a selected date range;
   
• View Representative Session History: To monitor whether or not the sessions are completed regularly and in an efficient manner by evaluating the state, resolution, and duration of each individual session;
   
• View Representative Response History: Helps ensure that representatives are providing appropriate replies;
   
• View Representative Online History: Monitor representative's activity for a selected date range;
   
• View Representative Overall statistics: This report provides a very good statistical summary of a representative's activity for a selected date range; and
   
• Add, Edit, and Remove ChatLink Auto-Responses: Use this option to add company-specific URLs and text for auto-responses.

In addition, the Reports option allows you to run cumulative reports for your entire Web site for a selected range of dates and times. This tab is most useful for generating period-based reports (day, week, month) and should be used by managers and executives to measure the effectiveness of their representatives' use of DesktopStreaming technology.

The Reports option contains:

• View Service Statistics: Compile an end-of-week performance report on service statistics for a specific portal (primary portals are either main or training);
   
• View Question Arrival Stats: View question arrival by the half hour. This report is ideal for assisting you with scheduling representatives relative to question volume;
   
• View Traffic Stats: View portal traffic by predefined time segments;
   
• View Session Log: Monitor a specific trend in questions or representative behavior;
   
• View Response Log: Monitor the response times your representatives are sending with their replies; and
   
• View Online History: Use this report to view the HelpAlert usage for the selected time range.

OPERATIONAL TESTING
For our tests, we set up two PCs -- one to act as the agent and the other to act as the customer seeking help. From the customer's PC we visited the test Web page containing a text field to enter your technical question, and a "click me" button. After entering a test question, we clicked the button and were presented with a screen that said a plug-in would automatically download shortly and if it didn't, to click a hyperlink containing a shortcut to a file called "chatlink.exe," a small self-installing plug-in that allows the support rep to share the user's screen, mouse, and keyboard. We were running IE 6.0 beta on our test machine, so we had to click the chatlink.exe file to manually download it.

After submitting our question, we then went to the agent desktop to see if the question was added into the pseudo-ACD queue. Sure enough, our test question was listed in the queue. A yellow popup window that looked like a Post-It note also popped up on our screen as an extra "grab the agent's attention." If we clicked on this yellow window, we could then click the "Send" button to actually accept this "incoming" help request. If we decided not to click on the yellow alert message, it automatically went away after a pre-determined number of seconds. Additionally, we could have double-clicked on the incoming help request within the queue to accept the request for assistance. We should point out, although this may seem obvious, that the first agent to respond gets the call.

In any event, chat boxes loaded on both the agent's and user's screens. Once the chat sessions were initiated we could actually close the browser window, which we thought was pretty neat. Essentially, the connection is kept alive through the chatlink.exe application. From both the agent's and user's screens we were able to successfully chat back and forth.

The agent has several preferences that may be set. For example, the agent can select how many seconds elapse before a question is marked as "old." In fact, questions are color coded as a visual aid. New questions start out as blue, then change to a red font color -- a visual queue that the question is dropping out without a response. When two minutes expire, if the agent doesn't take the call, the question drops out and the customer gets a screen saying, "All representatives are assisting other customers. Please try again." Other preferences include the ability to play a sound alert and to mute sound alerts when the agent is in the middle of a session -- sort of like disabling call waiting.

We then decided to test the screen sharing function. From the agent's chat window, we clicked on the ScreenSharing menu option and selected "Share Remote Screen." On the user side, a popup dialog box was displayed telling the user that the agent was about to view their screen. After clicking OK, a viewer application popped up on the agent's screen and a few seconds later the agent was viewing the user's screen. From the agent's side we tried to click on some icons on the user's desktop, but a blue marker kept drawing wherever we clicked. By default when you first connect, you enter "draw mode" so that you may draw arrows, circles, or anything else you want on the screen. By holding the Shift key and then clicking the mouse button you can highlight areas on the screen. You can also hold both mouse buttons instead of the Shift key to highlight something. Kudos to this usability addition, especially since helpdesk agents are often very keyboard-centric!

To allow the user to also draw on the screen (collaborate), you have to enter "whiteboard" mode which then "freezes" the user's desktop. Thus any animated banner ads or other graphics will immediately freeze -- the best analogy is that it looks like your desktop wallpaper. At this point, both the agent and the user can draw on the "frozen" desktop image. Also, the user and the agent are given different marker and highlighter colors to differentiate from one another.

WE WILL CONTROL ALL THAT YOU SEE AND HEAR...
More interesting than this collaboration mode, is the ability for the agent to take control of the remote mouse and keyboard. Simply by turning off "Draw mode" in the menu option, (or by pressing the hotkey F11 to toggle it on/off), the agent can then control the mouse movements and click on the user's desktop. This is a powerful feature allowing the agent to remotely troubleshoot and diagnose problems very quickly as opposed to having to "verbalize" the steps over the phone to the user, which can be not only inefficient, but also costly due to 800-number phone charges. We should point out that the user can take back control of the mouse at any time, simply by moving his or her mouse. Also, the agent may share his or her screen as well, simply by clicking "Share Local Screen." Obviously, only one shared screen is allowed at one time, or utter confusion and chaos would ensue. In any case, we tested sharing the agent's screen and it performed just as flawlessly as sharing the user's screen.

Performance (screen redraw, mouse movements) was pretty good across our T1 Internet connection. We tested it over a 56 Kbps dial-up connection and the performance was still very good. Expertcity said due to proprietary compression techniques and such, that dial-up is pretty good and that only 28.8 Kbps and 33.6 Kbps modems may experience some "slow" screen redraws. But they told us that's why the "freeze the screen" feature is useful since the highlighter and marker pens can then be used, which utilize minimal bandwidth. Essentially, the agent can point or draw arrows on the user's screen to point the user in the right direction.

When the call finally ends, the agent gets a dialog box asking if the problem was "Resolved" or "Unresolved." The user gets a screen asking to rate the experience "positive, neutral, or negative," along with a text field for entering comments. Also, when the call ends, the customer can opt to save the chat session as a transcript for future reference. When the session ends, the DesktopStreaming executable, which is browser and application-independent, is removed from the customer's hard drive. On the back end, the entire transaction is recorded for quality assurance.

Another feature we tested was the ability for the agent to replay sessions, either the chat transcript or the entire screen sharing session. Similar to a VCR, the playback mechanism includes variable speeds (2x, 4x, 8x) for faster playback. We played back a few of our sessions and all session playbacks performed beautifully -- except for one. For some reason one of our sessions, which was 24 minutes long, was cut off at approximately the six-minute mark. We were told that once we stopped sharing the user's desktop and started sharing the agent's desktop, that the session no longer records the screen. Expertcity says they expect to add this feature in the coming months, and we believe this will be an important addition.

Some nice usability features we liked were the keyboard shortcuts. If you press F10 it minimizes the chat window, and pressing F10 again brings it back up. In addition, F11 toggles draw mode on and off, and F12 erases any drawings. Another nice usability feature is the screen auto-scroll to handle higher resolutions. If you have a larger screen resolution, you can move your mouse near the borders to auto-scroll, or use the arrow keys to move the screen around if you have the Shortcuts Enabled feature.

We also tested the reporting capabilities of DesktopStreaming and were pleased with our test results. Running reports was very straightforward via a Web browser, and even allowed us to export the data to Excel for further manipulation. Utilizing these reports, a supervisor should have no trouble determining pertinent statistics on each of the agents for quality assurance.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT
This product only allows the agent to log on to a single queue. Since agents can have multiple skills, agents may be able to belong to multiple queues. We would like to see the ability for agents to belong to multiple helpdesk queues with the GUI saying which queue the incoming help request is coming from.

The ScreenSharing application uses a little bit of screen real estate for the title bar and it doesn't hide the agent's Taskbar/Start Menu at the bottom. When we were testing on an agent and a user both having 1024x768 resolutions, we were forced to use the "auto-scroll" to see the entire screen. It would be nice to see the whole screen at once. Thus, we would suggest a "full screen mode" which would allow the agent to "match" the user's screen resolution perfectly without having to move the mouse around the edges of the screen to view "hidden" areas located just out of sight. Citrix is just one well-known example of an application that supports a "full screen mode."

DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE?
We would like to see the ability for not only the agents to see the recorded screen sessions, but we would also like users to be able to see them as well. With our idea, if a user forgets what the agent showed him, he can simply replay the entire session by visiting a password-protected URL that gives him access to only his sessions.

It would also be nice if the question was pasted into the agent's chat window. Even though the agent "took the call" so to speak, the question may not fit entirely into the HelpAlert's window. It's also possible the agent was distracted and forgot the question. By copying the question from HelpAlert into the chat window, it would prevent the agent from having to look back at the HelpAlert window to see the question.

Two final improvements are support for Voice over IP (VoIP) as well as "audio streaming." The reason why we'd like to see VoIP is obvious. The reason audio streaming could be beneficial is the agent can play back a .WAV file on his PC containing instructions which would stream down to the user. Or conversely, perhaps the user's application requires audio and the agent needs to hear the audio played on the user's screen to adequately troubleshoot the problem.

CONCLUSION
Helpdesks and technical support will certainly like this product for its ease of use and its ability to get the job done quickly and efficiently. For the privacy conscious, Expertcity claims to be TRUSTe compliant. TMC Labs was very impressed with DesktopStreaming's screen sharing feature, firewall-friendliness, cross-platform support, and reporting capabilities, which is why we granted it an Editors' Choice Award without reservation.

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