[Case Study] As Founder and CEO of Jones IT, the task of proving value to customers was posing a serious challenge for Evan Jones.
The company was growing quickly and doing a lot of work, but it wasn’t always easy to relay to customers the work that was being done when it came to tickets completed, servers being patched, or plenty of other tasks.
Evan explains that in the beginning, “The main thing we wanted was to prove our value to customers. They’re paying us a lot of money, and we’re doing all this work, but we weren’t necessarily showing them the work that we were doing and proving it to them.”
Proving ROI to customers was made even more difficult by the “ugly” reporting tools built-in to the RMM solution the Jones IT team was using. In fact, the tools were so frustrating for the team to use, that most of the time they didn’t even bother trying to create client reports.
The Jones IT team also realized that whatever solution they found for the reporting job would need to be something simple enough so that even their customers would understand the information being presented.
For a brief time, Evan’s team tinkered with building their own reporting solution, but when he found BrightGauge at a conference, the platform’s features and overall look quickly convinced him to ditch the enormous customization task.
Getting started with BrightGauge was a fairly easy process for Jones IT. While there was a small learning curve, Evan utilized the BrightGauge team as needed for any Q&A resources, and he goes on to say “I think we know everyone on a first-name basis [at BrightGauge]; all the teams have helped, they’ve done specific projects for us… we’ve had some custom reports made, and gauges… I think we’ve put you guys to the test.”
Since implementing BrightGauge, one of the big wins that Evan noticed for his team was being able to trim and in some cases, eliminate alerts. Before, they would get alerts on instances such as servers down or network down - and in fact, there were so many alerts that they were being ignored and were considered useless information. Now, there are no more alerts to look at because they’ve been replaced with gauges on tv’s. “It’s easy to jump in and get it done without worrying about all the false alarms”, explains Evan.
Another triumph, resulting from the use of BrightGauge dashboards, was the ability to better track and manage the company’s outsourced work. Evan tells us “We utilize some outsourced services from other countries to manage a lot of our LabTech stuff and working with outsourced companies you need to be very explicit in what they need to do, how they need to do it, what their role is, and what their job is. We’ve found that BrightGauge is a good way to keep track of them to make sure that they are doing what they need to be doing.”
The results showed with the internal team as well. During a recent dashboarding session with each of his four teams, Evan taught them the fundamentals when it comes to using BrightGauge. Whereas before, the only dashboards the team had were the ones Evan had created, he wanted to give every individual the power to create their own. Evan goes on to say “I gave them the power to create their own reports and some of the guys really dove in and started making dashboards for their teams to monitor their clients and they got excited about it and actually started using it and trying to gain efficiency. That was a really positive experience.”
Harvest is by far the most useful BrightGauge integration for Jones IT, because it provides huge insights into their efficiency. The team can now see trends at a glance that would have been significantly more difficult to spot before. Evan concludes by saying, “any Harvest user should use BrightGauge. It’s a no-brainer. The access to the data that BrightGauge provides is leaps and bounds above what they provide organically.”
