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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

OpenTelemetry enjoys a positive perception, with half of respondents considering OpenTelemetry mature enough for implementation today, and another 31% considering it moderately mature and useful, according to a new EMA report, Taking Observability to the Next Level: OpenTelemetry's Emerging Role in IT Performance and Reliability ... and almost everyone surveyed (98.7%) express support for where OpenTelemetry is heading  ...

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If you've been in the tech space for a while, you may be experiencing some deja vu. Though often compared to the adoption and proliferation of the internet, Generative AI (GenAI) is following in the footsteps of cloud computing ...

Lose your data and the best case scenario is, well, you know the word — but at worst, it is game over. And so World Backup Day has traditionally carried a very simple yet powerful message for businesses: Backup. Your. Data ...

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World Backup Day

A large majority (79%) believe the current service desk model will be unrecognizable within three years, and nearly as many (77%) say new technologies will render it redundant by 2027, according to The Death (and Rebirth) of the Service Desk, a report from Nexthink ...

Open source dominance continues in observability, according to the Observability Survey from Grafana Labs.  A remarkable 75% of respondents are now using open source licensing for observability, with 70% reporting that their organizations use both Prometheus and OpenTelemetry in some capacity. Half of all organizations increased their investments in both technologies for the second year in a row ...

Significant improvements in operational resilience, more effective use of automation and faster time to market are driving optimism about IT spending in 2025, with a majority of leaders expecting their budgets to increase year-over-year, according to the 2025 State of Digital Operations Report from PagerDuty ...

Image
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Are they simply number crunchers confined to back-office support, or are they the strategic influencers shaping the future of your enterprise? The reality is that data analysts are far more the latter. In fact, 94% of analysts agree their role is pivotal to making high-level business decisions, proving that they are becoming indispensable partners in shaping strategy ...

Today's enterprises exist in rapidly growing, complex IT landscapes that can inadvertently create silos and lead to the accumulation of disparate tools. To successfully manage such growth, these organizations must realize the requisite shift in corporate culture and workflow management needed to build trust in new technologies. This is particularly true in cases where enterprises are turning to automation and autonomic IT to offload the burden from IT professionals. This interplay between technology and culture is crucial in guiding teams using AIOps and observability solutions to proactively manage operations and transition toward a machine-driven IT ecosystem ...

Gartner identified the top data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2025 that are driving the emergence of a wide range of challenges, including organizational and human issues ...

Traditional network monitoring, while valuable, often falls short in providing the context needed to truly understand network behavior. This is where observability shines. In this blog, we'll compare and contrast traditional network monitoring and observability — highlighting the benefits of this evolving approach ...