Always keep tabs on your Apple devices

We’re excited to welcome Katarina Ondrejovicova to the team as a Customer Success Specialist! Join us in learning more about the newest member of our growing BrightGauge family…   In the beginning   Katarina is the first BrightGauger to come to us from Europe - she was born and raised in the country of Slovakia. Katarina graduated from Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic, which is the second largest city after Prague and is widely known for Moto GP.   While in university, Katarina was lucky enough to study abroad in southern Spain, which helped to fuel her love of travel.    She started off her career working for IBM, where she was tasked with improving the overall service level quality for their Sony account.    About 5 years ago, Katarina moved to the US and worked for Itopia, a software company that partnered with Google Cloud to create a cloud automation tool for remote desktop provisioning and management. There, she was in charge of Customer Success and managing the support team.   With that great experience, we were lucky to find Katarina and welcome her to BrightGauge.   Joining BrightGauge   Katarina was first intrigued by our software itself. Plus, in her words, “the company culture that respects individuality, promotes a stress free environment, and supports collaboration” helped to seal the deal.    She’s really motivated to be part of the Customer Success team, especially because in her role she will work with both customers and internal teams like sales, support, marketing, and product. She’s excited about working across the board to improve our customer experience.    We can’t wait to see what Katarina brings to the table.    Out of office   When Katarina has the time, she loves to travel and explore new places and cultures. Her love of photography means that her travels are well-documented, thanks to her Sony Alpha camera. Katarina strives to keep a zen state of mind through yoga, meditation, biking, and beach time. And she’s always down for some live music.    Fun fact: Katarina speaks Slovak, Czech, English, and Spanish! What will she learn next?    

  When it comes to your key performance indicators, sometimes more is more. The deeper the insights, the better the decisions you can make. So, how can you get deeper insights from your BrightGauge?    One way is to use dataset or datasource mashup*, which allows you to build gauges using data from more than one source. When doing this, the metrics that are displayed back to you are more complex and more granular, allowing you to be a bit more specific with your results.    In this tutorial video, we show you how to utilize the data mashup function. If you have questions about doing this within your BrightGauge, please reach out to our support team.   For more tutorial videos, check us out on YouTube.   *Available on Enterprise Plans only.  

We frequently get asked how to choose the right metrics to report on, whether for client reports or internal ones. Ideally, any report you send out will be easily consumable yet impactful, so you want to be careful not to weigh it down with way too many metrics. Go for metrics that are direct and that clearly get your message across.    When it comes to BrightGauge, a lot of our customers tell us how useful it is to see how their peers are using the app, so this month we’re highlighting Weston Technology Solutions’ internal Agreement Performance Report.   Weston Tech has been in business for over 25 years and at the core of their managed IT solutions is a passion for being a true partner - not just a vendor - to their clients.    Brock McFarlane, CEO and Founder of Weston, shared that their team works off of fixed-fee agreements, a departure from the hourly agreements they previously used. For Weston, fixed-fee contracts allow team members to be more valuable and efficient with time, but reporting on these contracts can get tricky since it’s not based on hour-by-hour work.    What Brock has found is that looking at Gross Margin is a truer representation of how a contract is doing versus just how many hours were billed. Identifying their most important metric - Gross Margin - laid the foundation for how Brock and team would build reports moving forward.    Brock also includes Hours by Tech within the reports, as any red flags in those hours can paint a picture as to why a margin percentage may be too low or too high.    Reporting on a client’s margin percentage can pinpoint where inefficiencies lie - perhaps a tool a client is using is giving more trouble than it’s worth - so that they can operate at an optimal level.   Also, by managing Gross Margin, Brock is sometimes able to avoid raising contract prices in the future, which his clients love and is a big reason why they repeatedly invest in Weston. This is a perfect example as to why consistent reporting is hugely important.   We’ve recreated Weston’s Agreement Performance Report for your reference: Think this report would be useful for your team or want some more info? Check out our Report Key to recreate it yourself or feel free to reach out to success@brightgauge.com and we’ll be happy to help.    Thank you to Brock and Weston Tech for sharing your insights!