NelsonHall recently attended Compucom’s Analyst and Advisor Event 2022 in Paulsboro, NJ.  As in-person meetings and events resume, it was great to engage with Compucom executives, including CEO Mick Slattery, face-to-face once more.

Founded in 1987, Compucom provides end-to-end digital workplace services for enterprises, midsize and small businesses. In December 2021, it was acquired by Variant Equity Advisors, giving new impetus and investment to its focus on improving the employee experience in support of the future of work.

Digital workplace services are becoming increasingly important in driving the overall employee experience, and organizations continue to invest in digital workplace services at pace. In a recent NelsonHall study of multiple IT stakeholders across industries, 91% identified digital workplace services as highly important in improving the employee experience and supporting hybrid ways of working across the enterprise. In addition, 93% rated greater personalization of services as key to improving collaboration in support of hybrid working.

Compucom is aiming to enhance its clients’ employee experiences by:

• Assisting clients to move beyond XLIs to XLAs
• Using its CXO office to drive improved resolution
• Accelerating its investment in automation of its digital support processes.

Moving beyond XLIs to XLAs

As hybrid working becomes the norm, a key goal for Compucom is to provide a holistic employee experience, enabling its clients to achieve experience parity between working from home, office, and other locations in support of hybrid working collaboration.

Accordingly, Compucom is increasing its focus on XLAs (Experience Level Agreements) and contracting on risk/reward in the areas it can control to support business outcomes. Heather Lockhart, Chief Marketing Officer, showcased Compucom’s new branding and reiterated the company’s focus on employee experience and the direct correlation between EX and, ultimately, CX for clients.

Compucom seeks to be the key enabler for XLA development across its client base and evolve Experience Level Indicators (XLIs) into XLAs working jointly with clients on business outcomes.

Current XLIs developed by Compucom include:

• Technology issues: age of devices and browser usage
• Self-sufficiency: self-service, knowledge use, and contacts per user
• Support quality: sentiment, response times, and onboarding
• Flexible workspace: cloud utilization, VPN usage, and peripheral access.

These XLIs will further translate into XLAs linked to contractual engagements to improve business processes and outcomes. The company will continue to expand these across its client base.

Compucom will increasingly focus on how its offerings can support specific client outcomes, and we expect to see more focus and investment in providing end-to-end experience across the workplace. Its persona-based approach will enable it to define personas by industry further and develop personalized experiences across the workplace.

In addition, digital workplace services have a key role in clients’ ESG agendas. This includes using remote support, immersive technologies, and Advanced Exchange to reduce onsite support to benefit carbon emissions and utilize Green apps to give end-users visibility of their carbon footprint.

Using its CXO Office to Drive Improved Resolution

Compucom has established a Customer Experience Office (CXO) to provide a holistic approach for continuous improvements, increasing service efficiency and customer experience.

It created the CXO office to look across its clients and enable more analytics and automation to drive a faster resolution or increased self-help. It has dedicated teams building automations and improving proactive resolutions. Through ITSM, it seeks to improve customer experience efficiency by driving SLA attainment, incident resolution, and reducing MTTR and contact volume while driving a knowledge management program to assist operations and improve customer experience through metrics including FCR and knowledge consumption.

Compucom’s CXO includes a single-pane view to track employee sentiment and performance across clients’ investments in end-user analytics tools such as 1E Tachyon, NexThink, Systrack, Medallia, and Qualtrics. This further enables the measurement of UX across devices, applications, networks, and home office WiFi environments.

Accelerating the Automation of Digital Support models

Compucom is investing in digital support models with more automation, self-service, and predictive AI-powered, natural language support options. This includes remote technician support, swapping deskside for remote support, and dispatches with remote and Advanced Exchange; in addition, looking at different telemetry and events from the devices deployed across the workplace and aggregating this data to view patterns and deliver appropriate automation as required.

This also includes triggering actions to propose preventative measures to improve configurations and predict, prevent, detect, and fix potential issues before they reach the service desk. Compucom also provides a catalog of automation, including scheduled maintenance for core applications and a simple interface for single-click resolutions and requests for assistance. Through analytics and telemetry, it is helping clients move from a group policy administration model to an Autopilot-driven approach that enables greater device choice.

Outlook

Compucom is ramping up digital re-skilling and hyperscaler certifications, and we expect it to continue investing in AI-based platforms and tools to enable a self-heal framework and increase autonomous remediation. In addition, we anticipate that Compucom will shift from a traditional L1/1.5/2/3 mindset to a real-time data insights-driven approach supported by site reliability engineers (SRE).

In general, we expect to see newer skill sets emerging, including machine coaches developing algorithms for AIOps systems, business value specialists, automation and AI architects, and experience and innovation leads. It will be important for Compucom to continue to ramp up its digital re-skilling, hiring, and retention initiatives to ensure the requisite skills are in place to meet future clients’ requirements and support business outcomes.

In addition, Compucom recognizes that the ever-increasing shift to SaaS and the increasing number of devices that require network connectivity is bringing new security and networking challenges to edge locations and continues to enhance its capabilities on the edge along with security. 

We also expect to see more emphasis on partner ecosystem and hyperscaler GTM initiatives and a greater focus on how Compucom’s offerings can support specific client outcomes.