Autotask stresses commitment to ITSM and MSP customers

Autotask used its annual conference (Autotask Community Live) this week to reassure IT channel customers that it won’t be resting on its laurels anytime soon when it comes to innovating and winning and retaining their business.

The theme of the event was ‘raise your game’ and this is certainly what the IT business management firm promised to do as it addressed assembled attendees – from the ITSM and MSP community – during the opening keynote.

“The SaaS business is a challenging business. We have to earn your business week-by-week, month-by-month. That makes us innovate aggressively, look at our support aggressively… It makes us sharp to earn your business,” said Mark Cattini, Autotask’s president and CEO.

As part of this increased commitment to channel customers, Autotask gave further insight to its much anticipated engagement initiative, dubbed Lithium.

“We’ve made a seven figure, multi-year investment into what we believe is the best community collaboration programme. [We’re] making it easy for you to find everything you want to when it comes to engaging with Autotask,” Cattini added.

Training and support is clearly a key part of how Autotask plans to drive increased success, by ensuring its service provider customers can also continue to grow and diversify their own revenue streams.

To this end, Cattini highlighted some of the training resources available, including some 130 YouTube training videos, which he said had thus far collectively garnered circa 10,000 hours of viewing.

More than half of the firm’s MSP customer base are using at least two products, Cattini added, alluding to the fact that increased product use needs to be backed up by wider support opportunities and resources.

“It’s about product adoption. And that’s on us. We need to make it easier to adopt the product. Product adoption equals success,” he said.

Cattini also explained more about the mechanics of how channel customers are interacting with Autotask. He said that some 53% of support tickets now come via chat. The majority of tickets are also now addressed in less than three minutes - a figure down by more than 70% compared to a year previously.

He stressed that same-day resolution was important for both sides of the customer/vendor equation and that the firm had focused on some internal process changes to ensure a higher rate of success here.

Autotask also used the event to talk up its international growth and how this plays into supporting the service provider community. In addition to outlining the firm’s global reach – which it said focuses on a local presence – and confirming there are now 15 offices around the world to support and engage with customers, Cattini said: “We’re on the ground, because it’s important for us to be on the ground for you.”