Some services take this one step further, and offer in-home technical support as well, for those extra tricky problems where a remote desktop takeover just won't cut it.
This is an interesting model for a help desk; rather than building a support organization that specializes in resolving problems for a particular set of users, typically under a support contract, these organizations offer their services to the general public, but restrict themselves to specific technology.
This approach highlights an important issue related to help desks in general. To ensure your help desk is a viable business, you need to limit your risks to the point that you can predict your costs to a reasonable extent. One of the major risks in the world of technical support is that your staff will end up spending more time than you anticipated solving problems, resulting in your costs increasing or your leve of service decreasing (perhaps both).
The more you know about your customer, and the type of problems they will be calling you about, the less is your risk. So you can take one of two approaches: know your customer well, but put few restriction on what they can call you about, or take the remote desktop support approach, which is to not know much about your customer at all, but support only very specific things.
The other way to limit risk is through pricing; if you set your prices high enough to cover most or all of the risks, you can sleep easy. Unless, of course, you price yourself out of the market.
Trends aside, studying almost any help desk or technical support business that differs from your own is an excellent way to look at your own business from a new perspective. How would you structure your help desk to accomodate for this different type of support? What you learn through such an exercise may open up new ideas for your own business that you had not previously considered.
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