Office Depot OfficeMax BrandVoice: Business Buyers: Don’t Rush Into Buying Decisions For Remote Solutions

By Richard Sine

With a pandemic forcing most people to stay at home, companies are rushing to facilitate remote work for their employees. 

But businesses should beware of haste as they purchase and adopt remote work solutions. The fact is that solutions that individual employees adopt piecemeal might not be appropriate at scale. 

“Enterprises have to strike a balance, because the tools their users love may not be compliant from a data perspective,” says Jon Reed, co-founder of diginomica, a news site covering enterprise computing. 

Apps that are perfectly adequate for personal use may lack the security features needed for business discussions that are full of proprietary or sensitive information. In addition to privacy and data security, governance may also be important, as regulation compliance may require businesses to classify, track and preserve content.  

Remote work solutions come in many forms, including videoconferencing, brainstorming, persistent chat, project management and document collaboration. When you are expanding your organization’s capacity for remote work, one consideration is what apps your teams are already using and how they need to access them, such as through a web browser, virtual desktop or virtual private network, says Reed. Another is what kind of devices your remote workers use.

More broadly, “it’s important to really think through the use cases for the solution,” says Jason Warnke, global digital enterprise lead at technology consultancy Accenture. For example, is the primary need to facilitate internal collaboration or to interact with end customers? 

The Role Of Service Quality

Service quality is also important because even the most exciting tool may be of little use if employees can’t access it. With most solutions having moved to the cloud, businesses now must rely on vendors to deliver service at least as reliably as the company did when it hosted solutions on its own servers, Warnke says. 

The current surge in remote work poses risks when it comes to service quality. A wealth of new tools to facilitate remote work has sprung up in recent years, often offered by start-ups. What will happen when hundreds or thousands of new businesses quickly sign on? Will these vendors be ready to serve and support all these new customers? Larger businesses often have complex needs—such as serving clients in many different countries—that newer vendors may not be ready to accommodate. 

An early step in ensuring service quality is understanding the metrics specific to that application, such as call quality for a videoconferencing solution, Warnke says. Businesses should negotiate service level agreements in which vendors promise to maintain measurable service levels. (Don’t leave it to the vendor to track and act on those metrics, Warnke suggests; make sure your own people are also watching them.)  

Tech support is important to service quality because remote workers need plenty of support, Reed says. How does the escalation process work when a critical issue arises that can’t be solved through automated channels? How, and how quickly, can IT staff or employees get a human on the phone? 

Choosing The Right Vendor

When you are evaluating vendors for service quality (or any other criteria), due diligence is important, Reed says. Ask vendors for a historical track record of performance on key metrics. Ensure that the vendor also has a record of working with other companies in your industry and check their references. Software review websites are sometimes useful.

Warnke advises that buyers first seek out consultants who have experience working with businesses on collaborative tools. They should also turn to their peer networks for advice. “Your peers can give you straight talk on use cases and criteria that are most important to you,” he says. 

Many businesses are already using productivity platforms from major vendors that have now developed remote work tools. These vendors would seem to be an obvious first place to look for remote work solutions. But they’re “often dismissed,” Warnke says, because sometimes different parts of the business are tasked with decisions concerning productivity and collaboration platforms. 

A company that uses too many apps risks confusing end users as well as overburdening its IT support function, Warnke warns. In the worst case, employees will be “whiplashed” from one solution to another as the organization fails to settle on the right one. 

When evaluating solutions, Reed encourages business buyers to “trust the buying experience.” Buyers should ask themselves how the vendor’s sales staff is treating them during the buying process. If you’re not being treated well at the outset, there’s no reason to think things will get better when you become a customer.

“Major software deals are really partnerships,” Reed says. “No partnership is perfect. You’re going to run into problems or misunderstandings. The ability to problem-solve is key to the relationship.” 

The Microsoft Teams collaboration tool is now part of the Office 365 productivity suite, available at Office Depot. 

Richard Sine writes about business and personal finance from Washington, D.C.