No visit to IT Nation 2023 would be complete without speaking to a ConnectWise C-Level executive - and that exactly what I did! Boston-based Geoffrey Willison, is the Chief Customer Officer. It's a tought job in any company including ConnectWise.Listen to our podcast - always important to track what the Big Dogs are doing!
Listen to the podcast HERE.
Here is the transcript from the podcast.
Harry Brelsford 00:00
So I'm with Geoffrey Willison, the Chief Customer Officer of ConnectWise. Geoffrey, what's your story?
Geoffrey Willison 00:12
So one, thank you for having us and in for being here and covering, covering Connect. I know you were here last year. And I certainly appreciate that, as I had mentioned previously was the CFO continuing, had been there for two and a half years up until the acquisition by ConnectWise. Now, Chief Customer Officer essentially means I've got responsibility for all the post sales, engagement with our partners. So our onboarding and implementation for those who are either new to connect wise, or adding a product or not, our soccer helped us service offerings, product support, our education team, and then our partner success and partner care team. And then product support. I think I mentioned that. So it's got a wide range of engagement with our partners. And I think you would ask kind of what, what are we excited about at connect wise in terms of what we've accomplished this year, and during the keynote, it was mentioned reimagination, right. We've really invested in our ECL platform, and now we're actually seeing that investment manifests itself in the products, and whether that's ConnectWise sidekick, you know, leveraging AI and RPA and workflows, whether that's new UI, you know, dark mode, and the PSA, which has been desired for a while, combine in our, in our PSA for projects, and we were just a tremendous amount of new activity that's going on. And it's a reimagination across all of our product portfolio. So we're really excited about that. Cool.
Harry Brelsford 01:53
And what's what's on tap for for 24? So I kind of understand what you're announcing, yeah. What what's the next year look like?
Geoffrey Willison 02:01
I think, and I heard it in the, you know, the crowd as we're walking out of the keynote. It's an acceleration, right? I mean, we, it's taken a little bit longer than we maybe had planned to deliver on some of the items that we've delivered the products that you mentioned. But now I think it's our ability to accelerate that innovation. And, you know, again, I heard it coming out of the keynote partners saying they've delivered and now we've got confidence that ConnectWise is going to continue to deliver. So in maybe the products where we've seen a little bit of a tweak or a little bit of an integration with ASIO. Now I'm expecting more. And I think as I have visibility into the roadmap, it's going to really reduce complexity for our partner base. And I saw something earlier that 49% of the attendees here, I think we've got 4500 people here live and 7000 registered and total, there's a pre conference survey 49% of the attendees said that improving operations and driving efficiency in their business is their number one priority for 2024. Right. And that's what we're trying to help them to do. Right. And whether again, that's through AI, better visualization, better reporting, whatever it is, you know, that's where we're focused for the next year. Cool.
Harry Brelsford 03:25
And for some of my friends, probably more in the vendor community. Are you Are you hiring? I always like to find out, you know, your staffing up? Or do you have visibility into the Nevada your area?
Geoffrey Willison 03:38
In my area? Absolutely. Yeah. A you know, it may be a shift we are. We're absolutely hiring God, you know, plans for next year. But in some areas, we're leveraging automation ourselves. And we're trying to one upskill people just like we're suggesting last night, and you said you attended the keynote, just as Jason is suggesting that our MSP partners need to do, the more that we can employ automation, the more we can upskill and have our colleagues working on higher value added activities, which improves their work life. Maybe work life balance, but at least their their engagement with what they're doing, and it helps to improve retention of colleagues. So we in some areas may not need to staff up because of automation. But that allows us to employ more people. Certainly, building bots, for example, for our partner base are developing a developer kit so that our partners can build their own workflow and RPA automation. All
Harry Brelsford 04:37
right. Well, I want to thank you for your time. Thanks for the update in your area. Yeah,
Geoffrey Willison 04:41
thank you for being here.