The BrightGauge Blog

  You may want to display multiple dashboards on TVs around your office, giving everybody visibility into the important KPIs you are tracking every day. With BrightGauge, you can easily create dashboard playlists to see your dashboards as a rotating carousel throughout the day.    Set your playlists up in just a couple minutes by following the steps in the video above. For more help, see our support doc or submit a support ticket.     

We’re excited to welcome Byron Peeples to the team as a Sales Development Representative! Join us in learning more about the newest member of our growing BrightGauge family… In the beginning Byron Peeples is a fellow Floridian, born and raised on the west coast of the state, in Fort Myers, Florida. After school, he decided to stick around, attending Florida Gulf Coast University. While there, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Communication Studies, and was active in organizations like Student Government and the Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity. Byron had such a positive experience with Pi Kappa Alpha that, upon graduating, he accepted a role to work at their headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee. As a leadership consultant, Byron spent two years traveling North America, visiting 56 schools in 37 states, and even recruiting a group of 124 to create a new chapter of the fraternity at Coastal Carolina University. For Byron, traveling the country and working with undergraduate leaders was one of the greatest experiences of his career. Most recently, Byron was the Senior Partnership Executive at Millennium Alliance, where he focused on offering business leaders high-level learning opportunities and access to powerful networking connections through their assembly platform. In that role, he really honed in on his business development skills. Joining BrightGauge While at Millennium Alliance, Byron’s extensive research introduced him to BrightGauge and news of the acquisition by Continuum. In his experience, an acquisition usually means great things. Couple that with the fact that there was an opening for a Sales Development Representative, and his interest was piqued! “The SDR opportunity fit many of the tools I’ve developed over the years,” says Byron. “From the time I reached out to the recruiter, to the final interview in the BrightGauge office, I felt welcomed and at ease. This was definitely the place for me.” Clearly, we all felt the same way. Byron is excited about learning the product, getting to know the company and culture, and trying out all the great food spots near the office.   Out of office   What’s the best part about living in Miami? A lot of people say it’s the beach, and that’s where Byron calls home! Most weekends are spent in the ocean or at the pool, hosting out-of-state family and friends and showing them what Miami is truly all about. Aside from that, Byron loves good food and craft beer (all guilt-free, thanks to his dedication to exercise). We think he’ll fit right in!

  When it comes to choosing the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to track, there are a lot of factors involved and it really depends on your organization's goals. But one KPI that mostly all business managers make it a priority to track is Profit Margin.    Everyone wants to know how profitable their business is, and looking at Profit Margin as a percentage is a great indicator of how well you're doing.    This quick tutorial video shows you how to build a simple Profit Margin Percentage gauge within BrightGauge. If you have questions at any time, please feel free to reach out to our support team!    For more KPIs and tutorial videos, check us out on YouTube. 

Becoming familiar with the ins and outs of BrightGauge can take some time and practice. Hopefully, you’ll find some guidance in our knowledge base and through our blog posts, but we know that seeing BrightGauge in action can make a huge difference. In our new webinar series, Mastering BrightGauge, we’ll help you really nail down your use of BrightGauge while improving your workflow. This series is meant to give you a deeper training of our BrightGauge features, whether you’re a new user or could stand to use a little refresher. What’s up first? To kick off the Mastering BrightGauge series, we’re going to talk all about building gauges. Lots of our users want to know how they can better customize their KPIs in order to achieve stronger data insights, and this is an excellent place to start. In Getting Familiar with the Gauge Builder, we’ll cover: The basic structure of a gauge Various gauge types (think: number gauge, list gauge, snapshot gauge, etc) How to format your gauges How to filter your gauges to get more granular info Design tricks (like adding thresholds and colors to your gauge) Bonus: our top 5 most requested gauges from customers You’ll walk away feeling a lot more comfortable customizing your own gauges and getting to the data that speaks to you. How do I join? Here’s what you need to know about Getting Familiar with the Gauge Builder: Date: Thursday, April 18th Time: 10AM PDT / 1PM EDT RSVP: http://info.brightgauge.com/mastering-bgs-gauge-builder We highly suggest you RSVP because even if you end up missing the live webinar, we’ll still email you a recording of the training, which you can keep on hand to reference any time you need it. To find out about future episodes in the Mastering BrightGauge series, keep an eye out for emails from us, follow @BrightGauge on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our blog. As always, we love your feedback and your questions, so shoot our support team an email if there’s anything you need.  

Do you love working in Python? Do you love gaining insights by visualizing and manipulating data? Do you want to enjoy work every day? If the answer is yes, then we have a great opportunity for you. What We’re Building... As you’ll read and learn about BrightGauge, our web app helps IT Services companies grow their business by using their own data in different ways. Imagine an infrastructure ingesting tons of data 24/7 from many, many different data sources, then crunching and presenting that data in real-time on behalf of users and businesses across the world. As an Integration Developer, you’ll be directly involved with fetching data from 3rd party APIs, figuring out what data we can get and how often, and helping present that data in a meaningful way using BrightGauge. What you’ll do every day and what we can offer... Be directly involved in building out new integrations that provide our customers with the data they need to run their business. Work with an integration product manager to flesh out and improve our existing integrations. Minimal meeting time and max development/productive work time, in a flexible environment. Be exposed to all parts of the business and customers so the feedback loop of what/why we’re building is as close to you (and the entire dev team) as possible. Rest assured in a fair and competitive compensation plan with benefits (401K, insurance, etc). Be an integral part of a growing and profitable software company that is already past those crazy early days of any new company. Get full transparency from leadership on company progress, team progress and personal progress! Work in the most beautiful part of Miami, downtown Coral Gables. If that works, then does this describe you? You thrive on Python, SQL, and Data Analytics. You are comfortable communicating and interacting with REST API services. You focus on writing clean, well designed and scalable code. Though you love to crush code, you also believe strongly that teamwork is essential in scaling any large product. You communicate extremely well, in person but also in writing through tools like Slack, GitHub, and Basecamp. You’re an upbeat and fun personality, enjoy being around others and can have some fun (we hang out quite a bit). You work hard but also smart, you’re always humble and you always think about how you can improve your craft. In your free time, you love to learn new technologies, help out others on the team wherever you can, and research new libraries. We’re a small team, and you must love the “get your hands dirty” type of culture. If this sounds like the opportunity that you’ve been searching for, and you’re a fit based on technical skills and the personality we need, apply using the link. No recruiters please. Apply now.  We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and are committed to a workplace environment that encourages growth and respect for all current and prospective employees based upon job-related factors such as their educational background, work experience, and ability to perform the essential functions of a particular job. It is our policy and practice to prohibit any form of discrimination or harassment based on race, color, age, national origin, religion, sex, military or veteran status, disability, pregnancy, pregnancy-related condition, sexual orientation, gender identity, genetic information, or any other status protected under applicable federal, state or local law.

    When you have the ability to automate client reports, it becomes a true game-changer and a huge win for productivity. We've had customers tell us it takes 8-10 hours per week to put together client reports, but with BrightGauge you can create, schedule, and send reports in just a few clicks. That means, you get 8-10 hours of time back to spend on other revenue-generating tasks. Yay!   In the above tutorial video, we'll take you through an in-depth guide of the steps you need to take to create and send client reports in BrightGauge. Part of the process is to set up your client mappings, which you can review in this video.    Once you set up your report templates, they'll automatically go out on the date and time you choose. A real set-it-and-forget-it situation that will make a positive impact on your client relationships.    If you've got questions at any time, please feel free to reach out to our support team. 

RMON Networks, Inc. got its start in 2002, shortly after founder Tim Howard was laid off following the events of September 11th. In a time of uncertainty, Tim jumped on the opportunity to realize his dream of starting his own business. Armed with a background in IT and finance, Tim started New Hampshire-based RMON Networks with a focus on securing his client’s networks, as security became a big issue after September 11th. From the start, Tim wanted to work with clients who placed a high value on technology expertise. 17 years later, that still rings true, and RMON has a mission to deliver unique solutions to their customers.  To help them run an efficient organization, RMON Networks recently added BrightGauge to their arsenal. So far, it’s been an eye-opening experience. We spoke with Tim to learn more. How RMON has grown over the years A lot has changed in the technology industry in 17 years. Tim recognizes that he missed the boat with some advancements, but he jumped on one in particular that has made a huge impact on RMON. “We embraced the cloud,” says Tim. “I was at a Microsoft Small Businesses meeting and someone presented about their hosted offering. If there were 50 people there, 49 passed on it. I was the only person willing to try it.” That decision was a smart move. After selling the Microsoft cloud solution to enough clients, RMON was eligible to be part of the Microsoft Cloud Champion Partners Program, where Microsoft sent leads to RMON on a regular basis. Once that happened, RMON started to grow significantly, enough to hire new staff and move to larger offices. In addition to the push from Microsoft, Tim believes that the RMON approach to customer service has helped differentiate them from competitors over the years. “I always tell my staff to be honest. You’ll always remember what you told someone if you tell the truth,” says Tim. “If we’re recommending a solution, you can come to our office and rest assured that we’re using that solution ourselves. We put our money where our mouth is. We’re true to our customers and to ourselves.” Becoming a BrightGauge customer As a Continuum and Autotask user, Tim and RMON attended the Continuum Navigate Conference in late 2018, in search of a better way to look at real-time data. After talking to BrightGauge, they felt it was the right tool to help them get a better handle on the dispersed data they had within their organization. And right off the bat, BrightGauge was eye-opening. “It revealed to me that I had dirty data,” says Tim. “I had stale data around our customers and our configuration items. We had processes that weren’t being adhered to or not clearly defined. BrightGauge gave us the opportunity to really take a look at ourselves again and redefine the way we approached our day-to-day.” When it came to Autotask specifically, Tim realized that he wasn’t inputting data into Autotask in the most efficient way. Opportunities were not being put together correctly, as notes were being left out and contracts were expiring without anyone being alerted. With BrightGauge, Tim and his team can create gauges and notifications around opportunities and contracts so all the right people can come together and plan ahead. It’s allowed RMON to get a lot more proactive instead of reactive. Future BrightGauge uses The RMON Networks team has made great use of gauges, dashboards, and reports, giving them high visibility into their important data and driving them to run a more efficient business. Next up, they want to place a focus on the goals component. “We are going to set goals not only as an organization, but we’ll also have measurable individual goals,” says Tim. “By being measured, the team will be able to see their own stats versus their peers. And healthy competition is a good thing.” We agree! Tim and his executive team plan to roll goals out as soon as possible, sitting down with each member on the RMON Networks team, regardless of their position. What BrightGauge has helped RMON Networks accomplish When it comes to the great communications struggle, Tim leaves us with a final thought: “At the end of the day, I want better visibility into our company and I also want the icing on the cake: better communications with our client. Having the ability to send Continuum executive reports or Autotask ticket reports and giving our clients information that matters to them changes everything. We’re communicating better and building stronger relationships, and I know it’s because of BrightGauge.” Thank you, Tim and RMON Networks for being part of the BrightGauge family!

When you have a lot of gauges that you are frequently using, it's easy to forget which dashboards those gauges appear on.    No worries. We have a really simple tip to help you keep track of your gauge usage - no memorization required.   Watch this quick video to learn how to find the dashboards your gauges are on.     By the way, are you feeling gauge overload? Try some Spring Cleaning if you will. Here are some tips for cleaning up your BrightGauge.    If you've got questions at any time, feel free to reach out to our support team!

  Have you gotten use out of Snapshot gauges* yet? We like to think of it as our data warehousing lite solution.   Essentially, Snapshots capture a specific data point on a cadence you set (daily, weekly, or monthly) and plot that point onto a chart. Over time, it helps you identify historical trends that could have a big impact on your business decisions.   We see Snapshots being used for things like Tickets per Endpoint or End of Day Ticket Count, for example.   This quick video shows you how to set up Snapshots in just a few clicks. If you've got questions at any time, please feel free to reach out to our support team!    *Please note: this feature is available to Enterprise Plan users only. 

‘Average’ – it’s a word that’s come to symbolize something bland, boring, or even sub-par. We are all taught to excel and be better than average.   Humans love extremes, including in online reviews. Why? Well the terrible reviews are insightful, and often amusing, while the great reviews warm your heart.   But there's an entire middle ground that's being forgotten - the people who leave average ratings, rather 'meh' smileys and more.   This silent majority is being ignored - and that's pretty dangerous. Because while it seems like a bunch of relatively average data, there are insights here to be discovered and leveraged. Ultimately, if we accept that all feedback is useful, then we have to treat all of this middle-ground feedback with the same respect.   But how do you do that? What lessons can be learned? And why are customer satisfaction surveys, even with lots of average ratings, still incredibly useful to your business? It pays to be transparent Customers place a really high value on transparency. They like to be kept in the loop and know what to expect. Transparency breeds trust, which leads to loyalty and repeat customers. The stats prove it too - 77% of customers would recommend a business to a friend based on their positive experience. Businesses that don’t fully acknowledge or value each of their client’s voices are not being fully transparent, as there’s insight to be gained and importance in every customer’s opinion. Whether it’s understanding that a necessary change in processes is due, or an indication of something that’s working and needs to keep going, reviews provide a perfect opportunity to get close to customers and address their pain points. Customers simply want good, open service - research shows 66% of consumers who switched brands did so because of poor service. So when taken as constructive criticism, all reviews can ultimately help a business become better and more successful. Plus, businesses that place a big emphasis on customer service and make great efforts to gain their client’s feedback prove that they prioritize their customer’s needs. Asking for a customer’s review isn’t an annoying business practice. Quite the opposite - asking for feedback says, “are we doing a good job of meeting your needs? What can we be doing better? How can we help you get what you need more efficiently?” At the end of the day, emphasizing customer reviews shows that you are authentic and that you care, and people ultimately want businesses like that in their corner. After all, people don’t buy products, they buy better customer experiences. Your best offense and defense Providing thorough customer service gives you the unique opportunity to be in the frontlines, so to speak. It’s not possible to reach every single person that comes into contact with your product or service, but it’s worth making an effort to reach as many as possible and speak directly to them. Customer support is both your best offense and your best defense: it tells you what areas need improvement, how your customers are using your product, and what is working well. Without insights like these, you’re essentially just making a product for yourself instead of understanding what you could be doing to make a difference in your customer’s lives. When you make yourself available to customers, it’s a chance to address their concerns (or praises) directly instead of letting their feedback get lost in the cloud. You’re able to provide a personal experience, get specific in your explanations, and understand your customer’s journey from their perspective. Pay attention to customer service comments Naturally, everyone gets a kick out of a really stellar review. As humans, it makes us feel validated and gives our ego a nice boost. Who doesn’t want to hear that they’re hitting it way out of the park? The problem with these stellar reviews is that they’re usually the exception, not the norm. While they should certainly be appreciated, they shouldn’t be the standard. The real gold and the real learnings lie in average reviews. And again, why does average have to be synonymous with bad? If you’re consistently providing average service, it means you’re doing okay. You’re not doing anything terrible and offensive, but you could stand to improve a bit.   The comments in these average reviews can teach you a whole lot. Customers may say, “These guys are always consistent, but I wish they would X, Y, Z…” or “I give my experience 3 stars, but had they tweaked this one thing slightly, I would have easily given them 5 stars.” That kind of feedback is incredibly valuable and can literally tell you what you need to do to kick things up a notch. Don’t ignore average reviews just because they don’t warm your heart the way those exceptional ones do. Doing so can lead to huge missed opportunities. How to evaluate your customer experiences Understanding the value of each review is just the first step in the process. Mining for that data is equally important. You’re likely relying on a tool like SmileBack to help you gather your customer feedback, which is a good move because it’s smart to be methodical and accurate with information this important. But how do you keep track of all those survey responses and the insights they provide? Pairing SmileBack with BrightGauge has proven to be a valuable way to slice and dice CSAT data.   BrightGauge dashboards show your CSAT data in real-time, as it’s happening. You gain visibility into your average scores, your number of negative or neutral or positive reactions, your reactions per technician on your team, and so on. With BrightGauge, you can set up audible and visible alerts if your scores fall below a specified number, so you can take course corrective action immediately. According to Zendesk research, 89% of support teams already use some kind of integration. High-performing companies use a third more on average. The lesson: get involved, have the ability to be proactive about your customer service, and be sharper in your customer experience. Conclusion   In sum, the most important thing about customer feedback is that you place high value on every single piece of feedback you receive. Be deliberate about the way you digest these reviews. Looking at them from a constructive point of view will help you run a better business and will help you give your customers what they want. Happy customers who feel like they are being heard - even if what they are saying is considered ‘average’ - are more likely to stick with you. So, it really pays to pay attention. For more on CSAT feedback that'll get you results, download our whitepaper, 'Customer Satisfaction Surveys That Work'.    Ashley Scrace Wendel is the Marketing Manager at SmileBack. Now based in Berlin, Germany, Ashley is a comms pro, with experience from startups and international brands across Europe. If he’s not helping SmileBack with their communication efforts, he’s playing the guitar, singing, podcasting, or enjoying a new travel destination. Connect with Ashley on LinkedIn.