Owning one car means no way to the parts store when...
You bought the wrong brake pads, water pump, alternator, etc.
If you don't have two cars, I suppose you can always call your buddy and ask him for a ride to exchange the parts, but if you have another vehicle, you're not down regardless.
The same applies to support - if you only have one solution at hand and it's not cutting the mustard with regards to a particular client's service needs, you can always call your competitor and have him earn the money
I personally (at this time) prefer Mikogo. It works great and is completely cross platform - something I must have when the service MUST be performed in an environment where the client is running KDE, Gnome, or Xfce. Otherwise, I prefer ssh and scp when providing service for UNIX (including Mac) systems.
TeamViewer gets a lot of accolades, but it really isn't one of my favorites, and although I haven't tried LogMeIn Free (I intend to check it out), a real deal breaker for me with any remote administration software is a lack of cross-platform capability.
I know many folks here just scrape viruses from wyndoze boxes and if that's all you're doing then great, but I don't even run wyndoze - unless it's as a guest OS on VMware or in the case of my laptop, VirtualBox.
Having a choice of tools at your disposal is paramount to being able to provide service in a myriad of situations, and as most of us will probably agree, each issue the client has is often unique.
Make sure you're competent using and installing VNC (There are several, and some of the remote support apps you are using are merely re-skins of VNS with a couple of added features.
RDP is native to wyndoze - use it when you can. Krdc is a fine application that supports both RDP and VNC too.
One of the problems with trying to make a connection to a new client with MSTSC is that the client is probably behind a firewall so the connection needs to be initiated from there.
When that's the case (as with a new customer), Mikogo, TeamViewer, and others fit the bill nicely, since you can make it easy for the customer to initiate the session by providing a link or by providing you with the session id, respectively.
Once you secure a new customer, perhaps the most cost effective solution is to place an admin workstation in the client site and set up port forwarding for that workstation on their firewall, or do 1:1 NAT so you can open the firewall to incoming connections from your own admin station (which has a static IP).
Finally, there are third party solutions out there that will perform windows, wireless router/firewall, and PDA support for a fixed fee. You decide what your margin is and the solutions are complete branded with your company name, logo, links, and tier 1/2 technicians actually answer the phone answering the phone with your company name as specified.
While many folks get perturbed when someone who's command of English is less than they would like, many of the calls I would normally get from end users are mundane, time consuming, and don't return the billable hours that other projects requiring my time do, so farming out the virus ridden folks, or those who can't set up their Linksys routers to overseas call centers (and making 25 bucks a pop) isn't such a bad idea.
These offshore companies need to be researched too, ask for references, and remember, you can earmark certain types of issues as those that will be directly forwarded to your team, as well as tier 3 issues.
Since most of our time is spent on enterprise issues, the lone user who detonated a virus on their Win ME box might not otherwise be worth our time, although we try to personally handle these tickets too during slow periods.
I hope that helps
Kindest regards,
.
