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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

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...

In 2026, the cost of downtime or an outage is no longer just a technical inconvenience; it's a $600 billion wake up call for global businesses. As our digital ecosystems become  more interconnected, each touchpoint introduces new risks and multiplies the consequences when things go wrong. And the data is clear: aggregate downtime costs  for Global 2,000 companies have surged 50% since 2024, reaching a staggering $600 billion ...

Deloitte found that 74% of enterprises expect to deploy agentic AI solutions in the next 24 months. However, the rush to deployment is outpacing foundational work, though. Only 21% of enterprises have fully formed agent governance models in place. The result? AI agents deployed without guidance or governance begin to function as fragmented islands of complexity ...

Cloud spending is no longer viewed as a passthrough IT expense, but as a strategic financial lever that directly impacts innovation capacity, profitability and enterprise resilience, according to the CFO Cloud Cost Optimization Report from Azul ...

As AI moves from generating responses to performing actions, the need for trust increases exponentially. And as organizations enlist AI agents for increasingly sophisticated business processes, trust is going to be the single most important theme for spurring adoption. What can organizations do to build trustworthy AI agents? ...

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...