Unlocking the User’s Perspective: A Q&A with Consulting4IT
For even the most successful IT organizations, providing innovative solutions is only half the battle. There’s one thing that matters above all else when it comes to solving IT problems: the perspective of the employees. In the past, service providers could answer the question: “What incident occurred?” Now, they’re able to answer a much more important question: “What did users really experience?”
That was a big part of the journey for Consulting4IT, one of our Platinum Partners since 2014. With headquarters in Germany, Consulting4IT supports over 600 clients nationwide, and they’ve won a number of awards for their innovative ITSM projects.
Below, we speak with Marvin Münch, Head of Presales & Customer Experience at Consulting4IT, to get some insight into how this successful company has enhanced their approach to IT service management over the years. Read on to learn why they partnered with Nexthink, what challenges they’ve helped their clients conquer during the pandemic, and much more!
Can you start by giving some background on Consulting4IT’s top priorities for your clients, and how those priorities have evolved over recent years?
Before we started working with Nexthink, we were just focused primarily on IT service management. So through service catalogs and service management we were helping our customers create their workplaces — but we really only had a perspective on the service side.
It was always challenging to get the user perspective of how well services were actually running at the endpoint. That was always a bit of a black box. This was a curiosity for us: to get a deeper view into the end user’s perspective. And from there we became interested in Nexthink, and that’s where our journey really began.
What were the main challenges you ran into prior to getting that visibility into the user’s perspective?
When you’re providing services to customers as an IT organization, typically it stops there. We didn’t know what to expect beyond that. We could see problems and incidents coming from the endpoints, but we weren’t really sure what was happening on the endpoint.
When we asked customers if they knew what was causing issues for their users, nobody could really answer. They had nothing to go off of except for incident tickets, and so they weren’t able to see deeper into the problems their employees were experiencing. They were getting stuck after deploying workplace technology to users; they couldn’t get a step further.
Being able to utilize Nexthink was a game-changer here. It was so easy, after deploying the collector onto the endpoint, for the customer to now really see what was happening. They didn’t have to look into incidents and sift through ticket data to figure it out on their own.
So that was the real game-changer: finding the root causes for issues, instead of just seeing that there are issues and having to guess how to solve them. We were early adopters, and even now it’s still something that’s relatively new in the German market. But it’s becoming more common as the perspective around IT is changing. We’re definitely seeing a total perspective shift around focusing on user experience.
How has your role in providing services to your customers changed since the pandemic? Are you seeing a lot of customers trying to implement hybrid workplaces or returning to the office?
It very much varies based on the customer. We have some customers who are sticking with the hybrid solution, where they don’t necessarily care where their employees are working. But we have other customers who are trying to get employees back to the office. And they’re searching for help so they can really see how user experience compares between in-office and at home.
The customers who are looking to create a flexible workplace, they’re getting information from Nexthink to find out how to adapt their infrastructure to provide service to users no matter where they’re sitting. But we’ve found that the customers who aren’t adapting as much to new technologies, they’re the companies who are most likely to look for a way to get employees back to the office.
What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve been able to help customers solve during the past year?
Obviously there’s been a number of challenges with remote working and hybrid working happening so quickly. There’s the hardware side of things, of course; being able to request the right hardware that users need. But companies also needed to be able to connect with users just to see how things are going in their home offices. Being able to use Engage to connect IT with end users and the company has been a big help during the pandemic.
One example I can think of is a very simple one, but one that becomes a very big challenge when everyone is working from home: issues with WiFi signal strength. That’s something everybody deals with, right? But it’s still one of the major things that customers had trouble solving during the early days of the pandemic. And now with Nexthink it’s so easy to see that WiFi strength issue before it really causes a problem.
Our customers are really utilizing the Engage and Act functions for their users in home offices, so that’s been the biggest game-changer for them.
