Workplace leaders around the world are struggling to shift their IT organizations from being technology enablers to experience transformers. As enterprises are aiming to usher in a flexible and hybrid future of work, technology solution vendors and managed service providers have the opportunity to play a significant role. Compucom, a U.S.-based technology service provider, is leveraging its capabilities in experience management to offer North American clients support as they navigate these rapidly changing times and evolving employee and customer expectations.
ISG advisors and analysts recently attended the Compucom Advisor Day in its New Jersey facility, where they were briefed by Compucom executives, including CEO Mick Slattery. The firm presented its digital workplace vision, end-user experience philosophy and related offerings. It was the firm’s first advisor day after its spin-off from Office Depot in late 2021. Although Compucom has been around for about 35 years, in many ways, the recent spin-off allows for a rebirth, with improved marketing, branding and market differentiation.
According to ISG, key Compucom differentiators include:
Strong local presence: The firm targets mid-size to large clients in the U.S. and Canada and the rest of North America. It has organized its internal accounts and customer success teams for targeted sales and customer experience management. Compucom has a strong local presence and can support the digital workplace requirements of local and federal clients as well as extend support to local clients with global operations. One key differentiator is it field support, which serves as a local onsite support partner for other global competitors.
Experience focus: Compucom understands that workplace transformation initiatives are shifting focus from technology enablement toward experience management. As a response, it has transformed its value proposition to improve employee experience with respect to technology choice, workplace flexibility, user-defined support and data security. Compucom aspires to be known as an experience accelerator. Its initiatives have led to Compucom being named a “Market Leader” in the 2022 ISG Provider Lens™ Future of Work — Services and Solutions report for the U.S.
Telemetry-based, industry-level insights: Compucom provides insights into device-, operating-system- and application-level data by leveraging partnerships with experience management solutions. It analyzes data from technology performance and combines that with user feedback collected through surveys. It then determines opportunities for enhancements, automation and knowledge articles to support service desk agents. Telemetry-based insights are helping Compucom improve end-to-end process management for different industries such as Retail, Hospitals and BFSI. This is extremely important as the latest insights from ISG Research and our Voice of Customer (VoC) survey highlight that enterprise clients prefer when their managed workplace service provider understands their business.
Dedicated imaging and distribution center: From its large, state-of-the-art imaging and distribution center, Compucom manages the entire device lifecycle process (procurement, imaging, troubleshooting, returns and shipment), for not only end-user devices but also enterprises IT assets, such as routers and servers. The facility, which is spread across multiple acres, provides device support for clients across North America.
Challenges to Implementing Experience Level Agreement
Compucom is targeting areas adjacent to the domain of its work by identifying and expanding whitespaces where it can add value for its clients. For example, it is expanding the services scope for end-user computing clients to include employee onboarding process, device as a service (DaaS), IT asset management and mobility services.
ISG’s work with enterprise clients and managed workplace service providers has highlighted that user-behavior change is one of the key challenges in implementing an eXperience level agreement (XLA) approach. To address this challenge, Compucom is offering adoption management capabilities that leverage insights from telemetry and user feedback received through surveys. It analyzes the insights to identify improvement areas, such as accelerating technology adoption initiatives.
While it is helping its clients on their future of work journey, Compucom also is improving its own sustainability initiatives by focusing on people and community. The company has affinity groups that represent all sections of society and work to build inclusivity. The firm also donated $250 on behalf of each attendee of the Advisor Day 2022 and Compucom’s Women in Tech affinity group toward non-profit organizations that ensure technology and business education for women.
Compucom presented its bold vision, renewed vigor and strong capabilities to serve its clients and community at large at its Advisor Day. As global organizations are increasingly adopting XLAs as opposed to transactional-level SLAs, managed workplace service providers can highlight the differentiation they bring. There is a huge opportunity to analyze massive amounts of data being generated from workplace technology performance and structure those into business-level outcomes. Compucom is prepared for this challenge with its strong focus on industry-level differentiation and its experience with distributed technology enablement.
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About the authors
Mrinal Rai
Mrinal Rai is Assistant Director and Principal Analyst at ISG and leads research for the future of work and enterprise customer experience. His expertise is in the digital workplace, emerging technologies and the global IT outsourcing industry. He covers key areas around the Workplace and End User computing domain, viz., modernizing workplace, Enterprise mobility, BYOD, DEX, VDI, managed workplace services, service desk and modernizing IT architecture. He also focuses on unified communications collaboration as a service, enterprise social software, content collaboration, team collaboration, employee experience and productivity services and solutions. He has been with ISG for 10+ years and has 16+ years of industry experience. Mrinal works with ISG advisors and clients in engagements related to the digital workplace, unified communications and service desk. He also leads the ISG Star of ExcellenceTM program that tracks and analyzes enterprise customer experience in the technology industry and authors quarterly ISG CX Index reports. He is also the ISG’s official media spokesperson in India.
