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Customer Support Should Be a Key Factor in IT Management Tool Selection

Shamus McGillicuddy

When an IT organization selects a new IT management tool, the selection process is grounded in multiple factors. Stakeholders will evaluate a prospective solution for its features and functionality, its scalability and reliability, its ease of use, and its cost. One other factor that some buyers overlook is customer support. The breadth, depth, and quality of customer support can make and break your success with a tool.

At a basic level, customer support is there to help you fix problems that you're having and answer questions that you might have about the tool. But some vendors try to do more than that bare minimum. For that reason, you should fully vet a potential vendor's approach to customer support when evaluating a tool for potential adoption.

Listen to Shamus McGillicuddy's recent podcast on network observability customer support using the player below 
 

I've been having dozens of discussions with IT operations professionals recently about how they feel about the customer support that their tool vendors offer. Here are seven key takeaways from those conversations:

1. Responsiveness

How long does it take for someone to respond to you when you reach out for help?

2. Access to the right people

Can you get an actual expert on the phone or chat in a timely way?

3. Documentation

Many customer support organizations will reference product documentation when answering a question or helping you fix something. Make sure that documentation is clearly written and complete.

4. Communication channel flexibility

Does customer support communicate with you in the way you and your team prefer, email versus phone versus Slack, etc.

5. Relationships

Is the customer support anonymous and ignorant of your environment, or do you have dedicated people who know you, your environment, and the use cases that are important to you?

6. Proactive and transparent communication

Does customer support help understand the impact of a product release and give you ample warning for maintenance windows to minimize impact?

7. Solution-oriented approach

Does customer support simply exist to answer questions and fix problems, or does it try to maximize your investment by collaborating with you on how to get the most out of the tool?

These are just some of the factors that should guide buyers when they are evaluating the customer support organization of a prospective vendor. If you'd like to learn more about how you should approach this evaluation, check out the latest episode of my podcast, Mean Time to Insight.

Listen to Shamus McGillicuddy's recent podcast on network observability customer support using the player below 
 

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Customer Support Should Be a Key Factor in IT Management Tool Selection

Shamus McGillicuddy

When an IT organization selects a new IT management tool, the selection process is grounded in multiple factors. Stakeholders will evaluate a prospective solution for its features and functionality, its scalability and reliability, its ease of use, and its cost. One other factor that some buyers overlook is customer support. The breadth, depth, and quality of customer support can make and break your success with a tool.

At a basic level, customer support is there to help you fix problems that you're having and answer questions that you might have about the tool. But some vendors try to do more than that bare minimum. For that reason, you should fully vet a potential vendor's approach to customer support when evaluating a tool for potential adoption.

Listen to Shamus McGillicuddy's recent podcast on network observability customer support using the player below 
 

I've been having dozens of discussions with IT operations professionals recently about how they feel about the customer support that their tool vendors offer. Here are seven key takeaways from those conversations:

1. Responsiveness

How long does it take for someone to respond to you when you reach out for help?

2. Access to the right people

Can you get an actual expert on the phone or chat in a timely way?

3. Documentation

Many customer support organizations will reference product documentation when answering a question or helping you fix something. Make sure that documentation is clearly written and complete.

4. Communication channel flexibility

Does customer support communicate with you in the way you and your team prefer, email versus phone versus Slack, etc.

5. Relationships

Is the customer support anonymous and ignorant of your environment, or do you have dedicated people who know you, your environment, and the use cases that are important to you?

6. Proactive and transparent communication

Does customer support help understand the impact of a product release and give you ample warning for maintenance windows to minimize impact?

7. Solution-oriented approach

Does customer support simply exist to answer questions and fix problems, or does it try to maximize your investment by collaborating with you on how to get the most out of the tool?

These are just some of the factors that should guide buyers when they are evaluating the customer support organization of a prospective vendor. If you'd like to learn more about how you should approach this evaluation, check out the latest episode of my podcast, Mean Time to Insight.

Listen to Shamus McGillicuddy's recent podcast on network observability customer support using the player below 
 

Hot Topics

The Latest

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
Cisco

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...