A remote customer service team refers to a group of customer service agents who operate outside of the traditional office environment. They could be resolving customer problems from the comfort of their homes, co-working spaces, and can be spread across cities/countries where your company does not have a physical workspace. Your company can provide round-the-clock support across timezones without worrying about the real estate costs involved with setting up operations at every customer location.

There has also been a steady rise in companies that employ remote customer service teams around the world.

According to a VAEDALUS INC survey of customer service leaders, 65% expected to have a remote or hybrid operating model, and 75% planned to increase their budgets in their remote-tech stack, including remote support software, hardware, and collaboration tools.

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Though the benefits of a remote customer support team are manifold, with great flexibility comes great chaos. Managing workloads for a distributed team can get extremely cumbersome and result in processes and tools scattered all over the place.

A remote help desk software that facilitates effortless collaboration and advanced remote support features allows your team to resolve issues from any location without comprising customer satisfaction. If you’re managing or setting up your remote customer service team, this article will help you assess the tools and technology you need to get started with.

What is remote support software?

Remote support software is an umbrella term for all the tools and technologies that help support agents and IT technicians offer remote support to internal or external customers located anywhere in the world. Remote support tools allow you to gather, respond to, and address customer queries across locations with full context. These tools are primarily cloud-based to give users the flexibility and ease to access the software from different locations seamlessly.

While troubleshooting or resolving issues remotely, especially with technical support, agents might need to access and control customer devices virtually for a certain amount of time to know more about the problem and execute steps to fix their issue. The remote support software should enable the technicians to securely connect and access the customer’s device and also share files from the end user device if need be.

Other remote support tools—like remote help desk software, help your team to collaborate with internal teams and customers to resolve a query. You can also document solution articles and guides in your remote help desk software to ease the training and onboarding of new remote support agents.

Benefits of remote support software for customer support

When your remote customer support team is equipped with the right remote support software and solutions, your help desk capabilities increase drastically.

With a good remote support software, you and your team can,

Save costs

You don’t need to set up a help desk from the ground up at every location your customers are present. Operational costs are controlled when your core support team can help customers worldwide with a robust remote support software.

Provide more detailed help

When customers cannot troubleshoot by themselves or when agents notice more complex issues, your agents can connect to customer devices virtually and give a more detailed solution via a good remote support software.

Close issues faster

Taking remote access of devices and providing remote assistance directly in the customer’s device avoids excessive back-and-forth communication via lengthy emails, leading to faster resolution times.

Track and improve team productivity

While working remotely, you may find it difficult to manage and monitor your team's performance. Setting up Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and performance dashboards in a remote help desk software helps manage your team better.

What are some must-have remote support tools for your customer service team?

Various remote support tools and solutions are available in the market to make remote support more feasible and efficient. These tools can be broadly categorized as below.

Remote help desk software

A remote help desk software is a cloud-based, online ticketing system that helps you to track, organize, and resolve customer requests across locations in one place. You can set up SLAs, monitor agent availability, manage agent workload, and track customer queries from multiple channels across different time zones using a remote help desk software.

Your remote support team can also access relevant customer information right from the help desk software to offer contextual support to customers. Though working remotely, supervisors and agents can have visibility into support requests and their resolution progress easily with a remote help desk software.

Collaboration and communication tools

Communication and collaboration are key for any remote work. You need to over-communicate to ensure that your whole team is on the same page and aligned with your team goals. There are multiple platforms for internal communication, including Slack, Microsoft Team, and Google Hangouts, that companies use to ease employee communication.

Choose one communication platform and make sure that all team members use the same tool to share updates and collaborate with other agents. Integrating your collaboration tool with the remote help desk software enables team members in different locations to have context about a customer query and resolve issues together virtually.

Remote access software

A remote access or remote desktop software is a tool that allows IT professionals or support agents to establish a secure connection with a customer device over the internet and access it remotely to carry out troubleshooting steps.

The remote access support can be performed either as an attended support session—the customer is present and initiates the remote session—or as an unattended access session, where the agent can take remote control of the laptop or desktop without the customer being required. Remote access tools slash the transportation costs and complexities involved in having IT technicians reach a customer’s location or vice versa to get the issues sorted.

VPN tools

To maintain the security and privacy of the information transferred during any remote access connection, a tool that enables a Virtual Private Network(VPN) is required for remote support teams. A VPN tool encrypts the data sent and received between the customer and the support agent’s device. This ensures that the customer information is kept secure and confidential during the remote connections.

File sharing apps

While supporting customers remotely, some screenshots or event log files might have to be sent back to the IT agent’s device for further issue analysis. File sharing or file transfer apps ensure that these files can be transferred securely from the end user device in simple steps. These apps support multiple file formats such as images, text, or even screen recordings as videos that can be sent to the agent’s device.

Each of these tool features can be built-in or integrated with other remote support software to give a holistic support solution for remote customer service. For instance, the functionalities of a robust remote help desk software like Freshdesk can be further extended by deep integration with remote access and remote desktop tools.

5 Best remote support software for customer service teams

#1 Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a cloud-based, remote help desk software that customer service teams can use to organize, manage, and track customer requests from different locations across multiple channels, including email, Facebook, Twitter, and your web portal. You can manage all customer interactions in one place and make sure that none of your customers’ concerns go unaddressed, despite owning a distributed team across time zones.

Being a completely web-based help desk solution, your registered agents can log in to Freshdesk and support customers from anywhere in the world without any pre-installed software or hardware. You can set up customized, automated workflows to assign and prioritize different support requests to be handled by the right agents. Remote support agents can collaborate with context, use pre-defined templates for faster responses, and also make use of the internal knowledge base to ramp up quickly.

Key features of Freshdesk:

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Collaborate and resolve issues faster with the Freshdesk remote help desk software.

Freshdesk has a forever-free plan for up to 10 agents, making it the best free remote help desk software.

The paid plans begin from $15 USD per agent/month.

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#2 TeamViewer

TeamViewer is a popular remote access software that allows IT admins and agents to securely connect to remote devices and provide assistance for troubleshooting.

Key features:

TeamViewer offers a free version of the remote access software and unlocks more features with their licensed subscription plans that are priced from $53.9/month.

#3 Zoho Assist

Zoho Assist is a remote desktop software that helps IT technicians and support agents to access remote computers and mobile devices from a single console and resolve customer issues.

Key features:

If you’re looking for a free remote access tool, then Zoho Assits’s free plan is your best bet. Their paid plans are available from $5 USD per technician/month.

#4 Freshservice

Freshservice is an IT Service Management (ITSM) tool by VAEDALUS INC that enables IT support professionals and system administrators to extend quick support to internal customers. The service desk software integrates seamlessly with remote access and remote desktop apps to make remote IT support effortless.

Key features:

The Freshservice starter pack is priced at $15 USD per agent/month.

#5 Splashtop

Splashtop is a remote support solution that offers on-demand attended and unattended remote access solutions across different industries.

Key features:

The Splashtop SOS product bundle for remote support is available from $17 USD per technician/month onwards.

Freshdesk: A remote help desk software to help you successfully manage your customer service team

Set up location-specific SLAs and business hours

When you have employees working across countries and time zones, you cannot have a single set of official business hours. This will make SLA management a major hassle and might lead to employees being penalized incorrectly.

With remote support software like Freshdesk, you’ll be able to configure separate location-specific business hours, plan agent shifts, and map them to respective agent groups. You can then create new SLA policies for each agent group to ensure their work timings are taken into consideration before assigning deadlines.

Support customers across multiple time zones

Multiple business hours in Freshdesk Multiple business hours in Freshdesk

Automation that enhances remote team productivity

Freshdesk is packed with simple automation features that have a huge impact on your remote team’s productivity. You can assign the support requests to the right agents based on their expertise or workload automatically and also create workflows that’ll execute a series of steps for tickets tagged to a particular category.

Your agents can also benefit from useful automation like canned responses and agent collision detection— a feature that notifies agents whenever they work on a ticket being looked after by another agent. Your remote team can thus avoid picking up support tickets their teammates are already handling and prevent miscommunication with customers.

Explore other help desk automation features

Agent productivity in remote help desk software Agent productivity in remote help desk software

Enable seamless collaboration with cross-functional teams

Cross-team collaboration is extremely hard for remote teams. Their work hours might not align with those of other teams, which ultimately leads to a lack of context and repeated back and forth. However, Freshdesk's collaboration suite includes features like shared ownership, linked tickets, and parent-child ticketing, so remote support agents can ensure they’re always in the loop while internal teams work on troubleshooting the customer’s problems.

Further, tight integration with popular team collaboration software, including Slack, Jira, and Microsoft Teams, helps your remote support team stay on top of ticket updates and collaborate with ease.

Collaborate effortlessly with Freshdesk

Slack Freshdesk integration in for remote support teams Slack Freshdesk integration in for remote support teams

Resolve issues in fewer steps with remote access and desktop control

Providing remote assistance helps your customer support team handle complex customer issues more efficiently. Agents can utilize remote access control and screen sharing features to understand customer issues better and troubleshoot faster.

Freshdesk integrates seamlessly with popular remote access software such as TeamViewer, ZohoAssist, Splashtop, Cobrowse.io, LogMeIn, etc. This enables help desk technicians to initiate remote support sessions securely in a single click—right from the Freshdesk ticket—and collect log files once the session is done. Further, the Freshdesk-Zoom integration also allows agents to use Zoom’s screen sharing and video conferencing features directly from the remote help desk software to view customer devices remotely and close issues.

Initiate remote support sessions from Freshdesk

Team viewer remote access software in Freshdesk Team viewer remote access software in Freshdesk

Scale globally with multilingual customer support

The primary reason you hire a remote support team is to cater to a global customer base. Therefore, It’s only natural that you should look for a remote help desk software that will allow your agents to converse with customers in multiple languages.

Freshdesk supports over 30 languages, and everything from your knowledge base articles, to your ticket fields, to your CSAT surveys can be translated to a different language. This not only makes it convenient for your customers but also helps your remote agents get on board quickly as they will feel at home right away.

Converse with customers in multiple languages

Multilingual support options in Freshdesk Multilingual support options in Freshdesk

Onboard agents quickly with an internal knowledge base and agent-assist bots

You can create an internal knowledge base with Freshdesk and translate it into multiple languages. This will help you onboard your remote team quickly and ensure they understand the different nuances of your product.

Freshdesk lets you go one step further with agent assist bots, where you can design the entire bot workflow and free your remote team’s workload. These bots can help you automate redundant tasks like trial expiry or refund processing. Freshdesk’s AI engine will also help your remote agents with relevant solution articles that can be plugged into their responses.

Do more with Freshdesk's AI engine

Training your bot in Freshdesk Training your bot in Freshdesk

Track agent productivity and boost agent engagement

Maintaining an engaged and motivated remote support workforce is a huge challenge. Since face-to-face interactions are missing or less in a remote/hybrid support model, you need to keep a close eye on agent performance and productivity to gauge agent well-being.

Balance agent workload by tracking assigned, resolved, and opened tickets within your team. You can set up SLA metrics-based dashboards on Freshdesk to monitor agent performance. Leaderboards are also available to identify and reward support agents who deliver a stellar performance based on issue resolution metrics. Admins of remote teams can drill deeper into agent performance by creating custom reports with Freshdesk.

Improve your team performance with relevant analytics

Track remote support team productivity Track remote support team productivity

Leading industry experts recommend Freshdesk

Choosing the best remote support software

While evaluating a remote support software for your customer service team, look for a single, comprehensive solution that has different remote support features, either built-in or readily available as integrations, to avoid additional costs for every remote support tool.

You may find remote access or remote assistance software offering a few built-in help desk features or a web-based help desk offering remote access and file sharing app integrations. List out the must-have features that both you and your team require in a holistic remote support solution and choose a software that has a lower total cost of ownership.

Ease-of-use

You should find it easy to set up admin rules, SLAs, and team performance dashboards in the remote help desk software. Likewise, your agents should be able to find their way quickly around the tool with minimal training.

Security

Security is an important aspect of remote support tools since most of the data transfer is happening virtually. Check for the encryption standards and SOC, and ISO certifications of the tool you’re evaluating.

Scalability

How many technicians can your remote support software accommodate for the subscription or license that you purchase? Does the tool have varied pricing plans that allow you to scale gradually but steadily without breaking your bank?

Security you can trust

Frequently asked questions about remote support software

Learn more about Freshdesk

Help desk software

Customer support software

Knowledge base software

Helpdesk ticketing system

Knowledge management system

Field service management software

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