By Dick Stark

On Thursday February 12, RightStar hosted a Webinar, “See What’s New in BMC Remedyforce Winter 15.” Remedyforce continues to improve and BMC is making it much easier and quicker for its customers to upgrade.  Because of competition from ServiceNow, Cherwell, and others, Remedyforce just keeps providing more value. One perfect example is the new chat module.  Just a few years ago, Chat was for cost add-on for Remedy users. The new release of Remedyforce includes a fully functional Chat at no extra cost.

The webinar provided several interesting statics on the value Chat provides to organizations:

• Web Chat channel has become the channel of priority for more than 50% of service desks. The traditional telephone is the fourth choice of channel for generation X and Y.  (I still like to pick up the phone and talk to a human.)
• According to the Help Desk Institute, in the last 4 years, fully-burdened cost per ticket (US data) for chat has come down by 20%. The fully-burdened cost for chat is 35% less than traditional channels like phone. A mixed-channel strategy provides an obvious opportunity for savings.

This was borne out for me this past week when the integration between my credit card and my personal finance software, Quicken, stopped working.  I looked for a number to call, couldn’t find one, so tried their Chat service. I quickly realized that I was chatting with someone far away, probably in India, and that he was multi-tasking, supporting several other customers at the same time. The result:  a wait of 30 seconds to several minutes after I hit the enter key.  Then, his responses back to me were pasted from a knowledge article and had little to do with my current issue.  After a half hour, I “hung up” with no resolution. This is why I prefer direct contact but I certainly understand why one person in India supporting three chat users at the same time is less expensive than a phone call to someone local.

Clearly, what Remedyforce Chat offers is an opportunity for our customers’ help desks to provide a full featured service desk of voice, email, self-service, AND chat with the goal cost reduction and improved customer satisfaction.  Remedyforce Chat even offers a Chat Dashboard that allows organizations to identify if users are leaving before they are assisted, to review chat duration to understand staff involvement and conversation length, and to identify categories having higher abandon rates.

Other new features:

• My Work Dashboard—Enables IT staff to easily see and take action on relevant work,
• CMDB Dashboard—Get insight into critical business services and supporting infrastructure.
• Salesforce 1 Mobile App—Updates to incident management and new task management capabilities.
• Configuration Migration—Easily migrate or copy configuration data from one environment to another.

Finally, what about availability?  BMC will begin pushing Remedyforce Winter 15 to Sandboxes starting February 27 and all Production ORGs should be updated by March 20.