Bigger, Faster … Better? Under Magee, ConnectWise Looks to Maintain Dominance in a Channel It Helped Build
… their business maturity and their utilization of the ConnectWise ecosystem of solutions. He uses these scores to help them drive toward their version of success, whether it’s a long-overdue vacation, a $20M acquisition of their company or working just four hours a day. He and his team feed those scores into a database and use machine learning to arrive at targeted recommendations: take this class, tweak how you use this tool, rethink your operational model, and so on. The database flags trigger events like a drop in invoicing or long ticket resolution times so the customer success team can reach out proactively and (hopefully) avoid escalated calls.
The program is nascent, only officially rolling out in July, but ConnectWise has spent two years building it. Its goal, says Fulton, is to help partners become more consultative with customers.
It Isn’t All Roses
That’s all well and good, and the program will undoubtedly help partners who are already comfortably successful to define and pursue those life goals. But it doesn’t directly address the very real problems with ConnectWise’s support operations or issues with its core platform.
“Ongoing support is hit-or-miss. We use their live chat regularly, and their response time is usually pretty decent. The technicians on the other end, though, don’t always know their product well and in most cases, less than we do,” explains Lee Van Iderstine, CEO of MSP Happier IT. “Almost all of our cases are escalated, and then we end up waiting days for a response. We have occasionally had great experiences with first line support but not normally. Many of the challenges we have go back to how the system was set up originally that let certain situations occur.”
And the jury is still out among a few MSPs about whether or not the Thoma Bravo deal will be good for ConnectWise’s channel over the long haul. Longtime partners mourn the days when they got to know their techs by name and could reach Arnie Bellini personally if they had an escalated issue.
“Their fast growth has changed the way they operate. Today, they are much more corporate, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it does make it challenging to get discounts that used to come easy or get some advice that is now metered, it seems, by the minute so they can send you a bill,” says Joseph Lamb, president and COO of MSP Integritek.
Lamb says the maturity was inevitable, and ConnectWise is a better organization for it, not only in profit but in the resources they have available to help partners now. But Integritek does miss the old ConnectWise at times.
“Sometimes it feels like we are dealing with a Google or Microsoft in how difficult it is to get an account manager on the phone or talk about a specific problem,” says Lamb. “Support used to be very responsive, and now it takes a bit longer. They typically get it done, but the size of the organization is definitely felt in the service department.”
Van Iderstine says there is major room for improvement on the Automate side, too. Despite an obvious push to move the Automate product to the web interface and get rid of the slow Microsoft Windows app, it just isn’t evolving fast enough to keep pace with …