NelsonHall recently attended Compucom’s Analyst and Advisor Event 2023 in Charlotte, NC. It provided an opportunity to meet the executive leadership team, which has evolved over the last 12 months. Kevin Shank was appointed CEO in December 2022, having served as a senior executive at Compucom for nine years. He was joined earlier this year by Matt Olson as COO, also a previous senior executive at the company.

Founded in 1987, Compucom supports digital experience management through device lifecycle services, digital support, field services, and modern device management. The company provides end-to-end digital workplace services for large enterprises and mid-size businesses, supporting 9m devices and handling 8m service desk contacts per annum. In December 2021, it was acquired by Variant Equity Advisors, providing new impetus and investment to its focus on improving the digital experience in support of hybrid working.

Compucom is aiming to enhance its clients’ workplace transformation programs by:

• Implementing single points of contact for clients to drive innovation and NPS
• Establishing a Customer Experience Office and Experience Level Indicators to drive XLA discussions
• Driving the use of automation and AIOps across its digital support services.

Implementing Single Points of Contact to Drive Client Innovation & NPS

Compucom has reorganized its account management approach to drive innovation within its clients in a more cohesive and client-centric manner. A program director in charge of sales, solutioning, and client resourcing for the account now becomes the client’s single point of contact. The program director is also responsible to Compucom for the account P&L.

Compucom has deployed this model across its top 65 accounts (~80% of total business), driving greater account opportunities and improved client NPS.

The company continues to utilize its end-to-end capabilities across product provision, professional services, managed services, and staffing services at scale to provide a continuous lifecycle approach for the client.

Establishing a Customer Experience Office & Experience Level Indicators to Drive XLA Discussions

Compucom has established a Customer Experience Office (CXO) to provide a centralized and holistic approach to continuous improvements, increasing service efficiency and customer experience across clients. It includes a dedicated team building automations and improving proactive resolutions through AIOps.

At the same time, Compucom has developed multiple Experience Level Indicators (XLIs), covering metrics such as device and application performance, to measure experiences across four key indicators through its DEX platform and to drive XLA discussions with clients. The four key indicators, each containing multiple XLIs, are:

• Technology choice: covering device performance, application experience, and employee productivity
• Workplace flexibility: covering network, device, and connectivity experience
• Self-sufficiency: covering self-service resolutions, knowledge usage, and self-service support experience
• Well-supported: covering onboarding experience, device lifecycle experience, and support experience.

These XLIs are supported by Systrack, or clients’ end-user analytics tools, putting multiple telemetry points into dashboards to identify opportunities for experience improvement.

In addition, Compucom has a dedicated analytics team that works closely with account management. It takes data from multiple points, including digital support, endpoint, lifecycle, field services, cloud, and security, collecting data via telemetry and metrics from services and sentiment.

The analytics team then utilizes AI/ML to identify actionable insights, which are solutioned to drive service or content improvements. Service enhancement use cases include performance-based refresh to understand if a device is not performing at the level an employee needs to do their job effectively. It also looks at software license optimization to understand usage and identify opportunities for cost-out, including applications on devices not being utilized. Compucom has developed several support interaction use cases, including quality enhancement, knowledge content, AI-chat content, and process improvement.

It also has the opportunity to further support clients’ ESG agendas through its device lifecycle services, immersive technologies, AR/VR, remote support, OEM partnerships, and by developing Green apps to help users monitor, track, and reduce their carbon footprint.

Driving Use of Automation & AIOps across Digital Support Services

Compucom is continuing to invest in digital support models with more automation, self-service, conversational AI chat support, and generative AI POCs with clients. It looks at different telemetry and events from the devices deployed across the workplace and aggregates this data to view patterns and deliver appropriate automation as required.

This includes using AIOps to trigger actions, propose preventative measures to predict, prevent, detect, and fix potential issues before they reach the service desk, and enable self-healing to increase autonomous remediation. It is developing a field technician mobile application to track, for example, ETA and routing automatically.  

Compucom will continue to increase this focus on AIOps and drive a real-time data insight-driven approach across the workplace supported by dedicated skills, including data scientists, automation and AI architects, and UX/EX leads. It will need to ramp up its digital re-skilling and hiring to ensure the requisite skillsets are in place, and this is underway as part of its strategic roadmap.

The company is also investing in Microsoft IaaS and PaaS capabilities, and taking advantage of and securing technologies including Microsoft Copilot to enable GenAI use cases. In addition, there will be greater use of Intune, including Autopilot and cloud-based managed services in support of modern management.

Cybersecurity is also a key focus for Compucom, and it is investing in new cybersecurity tools and standards. The increasing client shift to SaaS is increasing the number of devices that require network connectivity and bringing new security and networking challenges to edge locations. It also provides the intersection between IoT, operational technology, and the workplace in support of hybrid working environments.

Outlook

We expect Compucom to expand its customer-centric approach across key accounts to drive innovation and overall experience.

Compucom is increasingly focusing on how its offerings can support specific client outcomes, and we expect to see contractual XLAs being deployed through its XLI-based approach in support of client outcomes.

We also expect to see increased tailoring of its services by industry, including a more persona-based focus on frontline workers and industry-specific roles across the workplace and via its GTM with key ecosystem partners and hyperscalers.