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Support automation - is the name given to software platforms designed for technical support and service organizations to address problems and to achieve lower mean time to repair (MTTR) by automating problem prevention and resolution processes.

Support automation involves the building of a knowledge base of known issues and their resolutions to support incidents with delivery mechanisms. A service automation platform includes a suite of support solutions including proactive support, assisted support and self support.

With automated support, service organizations can deliver 24x7 availability to their customers by monitoring alarms, identifying problems at an early stage and resolving issues before they become problems. Automated assisted support enables remote access to sites that need instant problem solving. By automating the collection of information of devices and applications coexisting with the supported application, problems can be quickly detected and fixed.

Automated self support, automates the self support process, freeing users from self-help diagnostics and troubleshooting from on-line libraries or knowledge bases. Support automation solutions can be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and network management systems (NMS), and provide full customer reports to management tallying problems and incidents that were solved mechanically ensuring compliance to industry regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, 21 CFR part 11, and HIPAA.

Contents 1 Proactive support automation 2 Preemptive Support Automation 3 Self support automation 4 Assisted support automation 5 See also

[edit] Proactive support automation

Proactive Support Automation refers to support automation solutions that minimize downtime and enable 24x7 availability. This is achieved by constant health check tracking with diagnostic procedures to enable issue monitoring and problem solving.

[edit] Preemptive Support Automation

Preemptive Support Automation refers to a support solution that utilizes information that is either generated or culled from an application or service, e.g. log files, database queries, configuration changes, etc. This information can then be exploited to predict service degradations or interruptions. The upshot of this is a higher level of service/application availability for the underlying application

[edit] Self support automation

Self support automation is the term organizations give to their support structures that provide on-line libraries and tools for self-help and easy troubleshooting solutions to automatically and precisely diagnose and resolve problems and incidents.

[edit] Assisted support automation

Assisted support automation is the software that enables support personnel to remotely access their customers desktop or server for diagnostics and trouble ticket resolution.

[edit] See also

• Automation
• Call center
• Customer service
• Customer relationship management (CRM)
• Customer Service System
• Help desk
• Run Book Automation (RBA)
• Technical support