Biting Off the Right Amount

The term "oral surgery" can make people cringe -- with good reason. Luckily, oral-healthcare offices have technology and systems that provide the best services possible for patients, and make sure that the often frightful process can go as planned.

Enter PracticeWorks, a provider of practice management, digital imaging, and radiology software for dentists, orthodontists, and oral surgeons in more than 37,000 practices nationwide. At its Atlanta headquarters, the company employs 250 technical-support professionals, and Krista Ciccozzi, PracticeWorks’ director of technical support, says that the ongoing support the company provides to these dental offices is essential to maintaining a positive relationship. "After the sales process, the primary contact is going to be in support," she explains. "So there’s a big weight on our shoulders to keep that relationship strong."

A big part of PracticeWorks’ service involves remote connection -- having the technical-support professional literally take over a customer’s computer in order to troubleshoot and correct the problem. Ciccozzi says PracticeWorks had been using pcAnywhere for remote connections, but there were some drawbacks. For starters, PracticeWorks’ customers had to purchase and install pcAnywhere on their desktops at an additional cost. Also, Ciccozzi says, many offices still had dial-up connections. "We spent a lot of time troubleshooting the connection -- even more than it took to solve the customer’s problem once we were connected."

As offices began moving away from dial-up, and PracticeWorks saw a higher broadband-adoption rate among clients, the company knew it needed to keep up. "It made sense to look for tools out there so that we wouldn’t have to use a dial-in connection," Ciccozzi recalls. "We were looking to reduce the issue-resolution problem...as well as [to] improve the customer experience -- something that was easy to use from both the client’s and support professionals’ perspectives, and something that didn’t cost too much."

Ciccozzi says that PracticeWorks assessed many options, but Bomgar eventually won out. "[The Bomgar solution] is very economical, and provides us with a tool that’s easy to deploy to our end users," she says. "It also has features we need because in our industry we have to be HIPAA-compliant and encryption is really important to us."
Joel Bomgar, founder and CEO of Bomgar Corp., says that, as an on-premise solution, Bomgar Box offers a high level of security that represents a tremendous competitive differentiator. "Data does not pass through any third party, in contrast to GoToAssist, in which all screen-sharing data passes through its data center in every session," he says.

According to Ciccozzi, the Bomgar Box was up and running just weeks after purchase. The hardest part of the process, she recalls, was setting up profiles for the 250 support professionals using the software. But the payoff came quickly: "We recovered the costs of Bomgar in less than a month," she says, citing a 24 percent reduction in the amount of support call-time spent dialing in, translating to savings of $5,187 per day. And hard numbers are only half the tale -- the larger benefit, Ciccozzi declares, involves agent morale. "I think that not having to deal with the troubleshooting part of pcAnywhere has made them happier. The tool is very easy, and customers love it."

The Payoff
Thanks to the Bomgar Box, PracticeWorks has seen:

• a 24 percent reduction in the amount of support call-time spent dialing in;
• cost savings of $5,187 per day; and
• 4,000 remote-control sessions per month. 

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