When it comes to engagement with projects or with service requests, at times they think linearly and only engage with the person who set up the call or who submitted the ticket. That has caused some confusion because the CDW person on the call may not have realized that other people were on the ticket but weren't sent an email to join. Those other people then end up not having the correct information right away. Sometimes it has led to duplicate meetings.
There are two separate teams that we deal with and we have two separate agreements with CDW. One team is supporting Office 365. We get that as part of the subscription. And the other team in the CTS environment is supporting our Microsoft paid support. But it's a little confusing having two separate resources. We have run into a situation where we opened a case that we thought was for the paid support, but it turned out it needed to be dealt with by the Office 365 team. There was some confusion as a result, and the information had to be passed around. It was unclear who should have been handling the issues. It would be much easier if we had one way of opening tickets with CDW, because we see the service as coming from CDW. We don't see it as two separate entities. Then CDW would deal with things internally, figuring out who should do what, rather than expecting us to know which team should handle it.
CTS is very good for tier-one and tier-two problems. As soon as there's something really deep, something that is tier-three, it probably needs to be escalated to the vendor.
IS Systems/Network Administrator at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Nov 16, 2021
One aspect of the service that is pretty important is that CDW takes ownership of the support relationship and case management. It's nice to have one guy to deal with, instead of the shift-work support that you get with SMARTnet. It's a more personal support experience.
CTO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Nov 18, 2021
CTS works 24/7. That's one of the most valuable aspects for me because if I need assistance for one of our clients, I need assistance now. It's also very important that CDW's service includes OEM escalation.
IS Systems/Network Administrator at a non-profit with 11-50 employees
Nov 16, 2021
The service works as well as I would expect it to. It could come down on price, although I'm paying just as much as I would have for the straight-up warranty service from Cisco. So I'm not sure they really could lower the price.
When it comes to engagement with projects or with service requests, at times they think linearly and only engage with the person who set up the call or who submitted the ticket. That has caused some confusion because the CDW person on the call may not have realized that other people were on the ticket but weren't sent an email to join. Those other people then end up not having the correct information right away. Sometimes it has led to duplicate meetings.
There are two separate teams that we deal with and we have two separate agreements with CDW. One team is supporting Office 365. We get that as part of the subscription. And the other team in the CTS environment is supporting our Microsoft paid support. But it's a little confusing having two separate resources. We have run into a situation where we opened a case that we thought was for the paid support, but it turned out it needed to be dealt with by the Office 365 team. There was some confusion as a result, and the information had to be passed around. It was unclear who should have been handling the issues. It would be much easier if we had one way of opening tickets with CDW, because we see the service as coming from CDW. We don't see it as two separate entities. Then CDW would deal with things internally, figuring out who should do what, rather than expecting us to know which team should handle it.
CTS is very good for tier-one and tier-two problems. As soon as there's something really deep, something that is tier-three, it probably needs to be escalated to the vendor.