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Best Practices For Supporting Home Users: Page 4 of 9

Training home users saves you support time in the long run, and it saves the company money if the user can handle a problem on his or her own or can better explain it to the helpdesk. A recent home-office hire who somehow evaded the company's required training session showed us how important training is. When it came time to load his laptop, he couldn't open the lid, even with the help of a team of IT technicians on the phone. We had to send a local third-party technician to set up his laptop and printer--at $100 an hour. Needless to say, home-user hires now must pick up their machines in person with our training program.

4. Standardize on Hardware and Software

Home users should have the same hardware and software

used by your on-site workers, simplifying things for the support staff. At CMP, the home-support team manages software and hardware for all home users, including upgrades and installations.

We also have on-site service contracts with our major hardware vendors for hardware repairs, and our support team handles the software problems. If a laptop motherboard fails, we can call Dell or IBM and have their reps go on-site and swap the board. We also keep spares that we can set up and ship to users as replacements. Shipping equipment back and forth isn't efficient, but it works. The key is to track your hardware assets closely.