A few months ago Carbonite introduced a new capability in customer support called "GoToAssist" and I wanted to say a few words about it.

Carbonite has three ways for you to get support: free email, free live chat, and Premium phone support, which costs $19.95 per year. Over the past three months, we have been carefully monitoring all three to determine which solves our customers' problems the fastest. The winner, surprisingly, is not phone, but Live Chat. In many cases, what really makes the difference is our GoToAssist capability. This feature lets our customer support reps actually look at your computer screen remotely, diagnose your problem and fix it. You don't have to sit there on the phone while the rep asks you to describe what you're seeing, and then tells you what buttons to push. He just does it himself.

We've been training all our people to use this capability, and we're now pretty much up to speed. Our objective is to keep wait times under 2 minutes, though it does vary at different times of the day. We're graduating a new class of support reps in May, so times should get even faster. I hope that by this Fall customer support answer times will be almost instantaneous. We've been spending a lot of money on systems that keep all our reps busy either answering emails, chats, or the phone.

Below is a letter that we got from one of our customers concerning her satisfaction with a GoToAssist session. This is the kind of outcome we strive for at all times.

“

Dear Mr. Robison,

I wanted to express my appreciation for Ulysses and his assistance with an ongoing problem in restoring Carbonite to our computer. After emails with clear instructions and then finally using the Citrix GoToAssist program, he was finally able to restore the program. It took him about 30 minutes in order to figure out the source of the problem, and then he remedied the problem.

Thank you for able assistants, and in particular for Ulysses.

— Dave
CEO, Carbonite