Mike Stringer has been in the support services game for more than a decade and in that time he’s seen a dramatic shift take place.

“Service was very tactical at one point,” said Stringer, managing director of support at Citrix Systems. “Something was broken and then afterward you got the call. But that’s expensive.”

Stringer was speaking to Wikibon’s Chief Analyst Dave Vellante and SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier live inside theCube at Citrix Synergy 2011, the virtualization vendor’s annual user conference in San Francisco.

Stringer said support services organizations today have to be much more proactive. Users in high-stress environments in particular can’t afford to wait until something goes wrong before calling support services.

“In critical environments – you’re in hospitals, you’re in trading floors – you’ve got to get in front of those types of issues and you’ve got to build scalability into your services offerings,” Stringer said.

It is also important to give users robust self-service capabilities so they never have to pickup the phone to call support. “Nobody ever wants to call anyone on the phone,” Stringer said. As such, Citrix is developing an online, cloud-based support service, called Citrix Tools-as-a-Service, where users can access all “tribal knowledge” relevant to their scenarios in one place.

“Its an initiative out of the support organization that really is focused on information gathering, taking in and auto-analyzing that information, and providing back tailored results to the person that’s uploaded that data,” Stringer said. “What we wanted to do was customize it so it was based on how people were using the product.”

As part of the initiative, Citrix is working to make the service easily accessible from within Citrix Systems different products, according to Stringer. The goal is to make accessing support services as simple as “pushing a button.”

Stringer’s team has also developed a new offering called Known Issues Plug-in. The idea is that once one customer has worked with support to fix an issue, the process or mechanism be made available, with no coding or scripting required, to other Citrix customers with the same issue.

The Known Issues Plug-in “has been really well received,” Stringer said.

The services group is also trying to get better at communicating relevant information to the Citrix product development team, so it can incorporate user suggestions into products.

Ultimately, Stringer hopes his online, self-service support initiatives result in not just fewer phone calls to his support team, but eliminates them outright. “That’s the goal,” Stringer said.