Longtime Partner Stays Ahead of the Curve with ConnectWise neteffect technologies | ne-t.com

Challenge

neteffect technologies needed to evolve their already ahead-of-the-game business management practices from “good” to best-in-class with solution perfectly suited to their rapidly growing company

Solution

CTO John Campbell and his team researched and implemented different options, ultimately choosing ConnectWise

Results

Their alliance with ConnectWise allows neteffect technologies to pursue their future vision with a company that shares their passion for partnership, growth, and customer satisfaction.

“Switching over to ConnectWise was big for us,” Campbell says, “because it really automated a lot of the processes that we needed, from ticket acceptance to being able to track things and report on them.”

“We’ve been using the entire ConnectWise suite of solutions for quite some time. We are big advocates,” says John Campbell, Chief Technology Officer at neteffect technologies, a successful TSP of nearly 30 years located in Charlotte, N.C. Campbell has been with neteffect since 2001. Since coming on board, he has seen the company grow from three employees to over 30. As neteffect’s numbers increased, it became necessary to find a business management platform that was fast streamlined, and easier to use than what they were implementing at the time.

“Pre-ConnectWise,” he explains,“ our business management solutions mainly revolved around incident tracking.” At that time, neteffect was already ahead of the competition, using a small, web-based tracking application instead of spreadsheets to track tickets. But this solution had its limits. The application would accept tickets, but they had to be created internally—as there was no customer-facing ticket-acceptance functionality—and then exported into another program manually. Even though this was ahead of the game already, they knew they could do better.

Trial, Error, and-Finally-Success

The hunt for their next business management platform initially led to ConnectWise competitor Autotask®. But, as Campbell explains, they switched to ConnectWise before finishing implementation. “We liked the way ConnectWise did things, especially the work flow and the way it managed the back end. But we made a rash decision and went with Autotask.” However, halfway through training, Campbell and team were confronted with some major limitations that caused them to reconsider their choice.

“During training we realized the difference between the future vision of ConnectWise and Autotask.” neteffect was looking for an application that they could easily picture using—and growing with—for many years to come. “Switching to ConnectWise was ideal because we could see their vision of five, ten, fifteen years down the road. We share that forward-focused way of thinking; we live and breathe by it.”

ConnectWise PSA™ (formerly Manage), also gives Campbell the transparency he was looking for his engineering staff and sales team. “Before ConnectWise PSA, we lacked insight into our data. We had a lot of data, but no way to access it all to know what was important.” neteffect has always been a pioneer of change in the industry, and Campbell knew they needed to be able to interpret all their available data to keep evolving for their customer base. “That’s been our story all along,” he explains, “And ConnectWise PSA allows us to have actionable data we can easily translate into game-changing results for our customers."

Holding the Door for ConnectWise Automate®

Being ahead of the game sometimes means your perfect solution might not even exist yet. When neteffect was first looking to implement remote monitoring and management (RMM) software, the big name in the game was Kaseya®. Naturally, neteffect were early adopters. But, like their experiences with Autotask, they couldn’t seem to find the forward-thinking approach they were searching for.

In addition, says Campbell, “Kaseya was module-based, but there wasn’t much interconnectivity between the modules,” They were left wanting more, but for many years, there was no alternative they were happy with. They stayed with Kaseya, keeping their eye open for something new. Then, ConnectWise Automate was introduced, and neteffect finally had the RMM solution they’d been looking for.

Staying in the Lead by Staying in the Know

Getting the most out of their ConnectWise partnership means keeping everyone up to speed on how to best use the applications. “We’re constantly educating our staff and the partners who use these solutions to help them manage better and stay up to date,” Campbell explains. To do that, he and his staff turn to ConnectWise training tools such as the courses offered through ConnectWise University. In addition, neteffect sends a select number of participants to ConnectWise IT Nation every year. “The vision for business growth that we see there from Arnie Bellini and other ConnectWise senior-level management has been spot on,” he says.

Not surprisingly, neteffect has attended ConnectWise IT Nation almost every year since the yearly conference began. “There is a lot of value in being able to interface with TSPs from other cities. We can collaborate and share ideas because we’re not competing against each other,” Campbell points out.

Another reason for attending IT Nation regularly is to take advantage of the ConnectWise Bootcamp series of training sessions. Campbell sees it as the perfect opportunity for himself and his staff to get fresh ideas and challenge their ways of doing things to make sure they’re always using the latest best practices. “Obviously, being IT folks, we feel we can do everything ourselves. Sometimes, though, the only reason we’re doing it the way we’re are is because we’ve been doing it that way for ten years,” he laughs.

Highlighting what he finds most useful about ConnectWise training resources such as ConnectWise University, Campbell gives two examples without missing a beat. “We have gotten over a lot of roadblocks with the professional services we’ve been able to obtain.” He also appreciates the recent updates to documentation and Appcues in ConnectWise CPQ™. “That’s been awesome. I love it. I will be excited to see Appcues come into ConnectWise Automate and ConnectWise PSA as well.”

Find out about IT Nation >>

A Deeper Understanding

Partnering with ConnectWise gives Campbell and his team a deep-seated knowledge of business management that increases their value as a TSP. Campbell explains it with a fitting analogy.

“It’s like building a computer. Anybody can stick parts in a box and put power to it and turn it on. But if you don’t understand why the parts work the way they do, how can you keep it working properly?”

Finding a Solution That Fits

Once they’d gotten their overall business management approach on solid ground, it was time to address their proposal-automation concerns. Campbell says they’d been through the whole gamut of products before discovering ConnectWise CPQ. “We were using QuoteWerks® at the time,” Campbell explains. “But it just didn’t give us the ability to do our contracts and our recurring terms the way we needed to.”

That all changed thanks to a chance meeting at a ConnectWise IT Nation conference one year. There, Campbell ran into ConnectWise CPQ General Manager Kent McNall, who walked Campbell through everything the application could offer neteffect as a proposal-automation platform, including “more proposals than just quotes.” Campbell was sold, and another ConnectWise product was added to the mix at neteffect. One of the benefits of ConnectWise CPQ that particularly struck Campbell was the ability to provide options and features to customers that had real value and meaningful functionality.

“We aren’t just pushing widgets. We are driving solutions. That’s our mission,” says Campbell, “And ConnectWise CPQ helps us make that possible.”