One of the things I've enjoyed in all my various jobs is meeting customers. For all the daily trials and tribulations that we might go through, such meetings always reminded me why we were doing something. They always energize me and remind me who pays my bills.
My recent visit to a customer in Europe was one such visit. The customer is a university in Europe. The IT help desk had purchased Splashtop SOS. We had displaced a well-known competitor at that account. We met the head of the help desk, whom I will call Erasmus, as that's the only philosopher's name that comes to mind right now.
Erasmus' team supports 100-150K students, faculty, and staff. His key issues and concerns were:
To provide an excellent service to his clients (students, faculty, staff) as measured by time to fix their issues and lower hand-overs to tier 2 support.
To keep a productive and engaged workforce. A large part of his team were contractors that could come in and go at various times both due to supply and demand.
To protect the privacy and security of his clients and employees.
In the six or so months that they have been with us, he was able to increase his customer satisfaction by lowering hand-overs to tier 2 and keep his employees happy relative to the previous competitor solution that they had. As we were a near drop-in replacement, I did not expect this to happen. Diving deeper into why he saw that increase illustrates how well-crafted features, while on the surface technical, can have a deep business impact for the customer.
There were three things (as all good things come in threes) that Erasmus highlighted:
Multiple Monitor Support: As everyone is probably aware by now, using multiple monitors increases productivity. Our product allows multiple displays in different situations: when the technician has multiple, or the user does, or when the user has a single monitor and the tech wants to create a virtual display. Techs can also view multiple end-user monitors on a single screen. As seen from the study linked above, tech productivity can increase simply by having this feature.
Adding and Removing Techs: In our platform, you go to one place to add and remove techs. Erasmus mentioned how he needed to go to multiple places to change that in the previous solution. As with anything that requires you to go to multiple places, it creates room for human errors. With a fluid workforce, this simplified functionality in Splashtop increases Erasmus's productivity as he manages his team.
File Transfer: We allow drag-and-drop transfer of large files. This allows his team to solve the customer's problems while on the call, obviating the need to send emails back and forth. It additionally allows them to solve problems in tier 1 without having to escalate them to tier 2. This increased his customer satisfaction ratings, though he did not share the actual details with us.
Often, as vendors, we forget the value that customers derive from our products. While we talk about larger cases (say optimizing field tech costs through central remote delivery), we often forget about cases where a set of well-designed key features can really add value relative to our seemingly similar competitors. Or, when we do talk about them, we talk about them as just features without connecting them to what the customers use us for.
This was a great meeting for me. And, as it has come within my first quarter, has reinforced my decision to join Splashtop.
PS: In all my past jobs, when I visited customers, I usually got an earful for something we did or did not do. This is the first customer visit I've ever had where the customer is truly happy with us and doesn't have a single complaint. While noisy customers help us to do better, this is great too and illustrates the quality of product and support.
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