Normally, you bill your customers on an hourly basis. If you do your support remotely, you have a great opportunity to make precise calculations based on your connection history statistics. Here, web-based solutions are a good choice, as they often allow seeing your sessions history for any given period, with details like remote machines’ IP addresses.
While today many payment options are available with software vendors, it's sometimes takes quite some time to make a decision. Let's see what is currently offered and what the possible advantages and pitfalls are.
Working on-the-go is a good way to spend your time in a more efficient manner. Remote access is best done from a netbook/ultrabook or a tablet PC, although you might try using it on a smartphone (4” or a larger screen is recommended).
By far, malware problems are the most frequent support case out there. You hunt and remove the buggers on regular maintenance sessions. New customers would often call you, asking to fix a machine that’s strangely behaving, the screen is locking up, etc.
Remote access tools are the bread and butter of today’s support technician. For many remote access needs, traditional tools (bundled with the OS, provided by the OS vendor, etc.) are used: RDP, SSH clients/servers, Telnet, etc. Let's see how they compare with each other.
Oftentimes, you (or the remote machine) sit behind a firewall, and your remote access tool wants to work on a fancy port. Accordingly, you might have to open that port on both ends. It presents no difficulty if you have immediate access to network configuration on both ends, which often is *not* the case.
Remote technical support is an appealing alternative to traditional on-site support. Remote support means accessing your client’s computer remotely to do system modifications, updates or fixes. Of course, it requires certain skills and tools, but sometimes there’s no viable alternative.