An article by Kathleen Sibley, talking about how NEO eCare is the most efficient help desk support.

Phantom IT Support -- October 14, 2003

When the employees at Chairman-Mills have computer problems, they don't place frantic calls to the in-house IT person. That's because there isn't one.

Instead, says office administrator Laurel McHale, they click a button on their desktop that takes them to a remote help desk.

Despite the fact that the Don Mills-based company, which rents out tables, chairs, linens, glassware and cutlery, has close to 100 employees, it can't afford a full-time IT staffer, says McHale.

'As much as we're a large (small) company, we're a small office--a lot of our business is in the warehouse so it's not financially feasible to have someone on staff,' she says.

The service Chairman-Mills uses is called NEO eCare, provided by Toronto-based Eastbay Consulting Inc. NEO eCare is a Web-based offering the company recently rolled out in addition to its phone-based remote IT services.

'What we used to do is everyone would come through me,' explains McHale. 'I would make the call. Now with the new NEO eCare you just click the icon and make the connection, and Eastbay take it from there. 'It's awesome because there's no more phone tag.'

According to Eastbay president Jeff Ridout, NEO eCare is a Web-enabled application. Unlike programs such as PC Anywhere or MSN Messenger, it doesn't require the customer to install any software. Users can log onto the site anywhere in the world with their user ID and password, submit a trouble ticket and get a response from an agent immediately.

'They can start with text chat, but typically people are interested in the remote desktop sharing portion of it which allows us to take secure control of your computer, with you sitting in front of it, obviously,' he says. 'We can do URL push, so we can push a site directly onto your screen and do file sharing.'

Eastbay, which offers both a per-incident fee schedule and a monthly subscription rate, can also do what it calls desktop-observe, he adds. 'If we need to show you something on our screens, we can invite you into our computers as well, just to observe, not to take control.'

Most of the firm's 100 or so customers in the GTA are financial and accounting companies with between five and 40 employees.