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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

As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...