Scott Green launches new IT service management start-up
Built on Amazon Web Services, offering targets service providers through digital, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies, Scott Green has launched Aportio Technologies into the New Zealand market, a newly born start-up specialising in IT service management.
Built on Amazon Web Services, the business already has one customer on board, with plans in place to launch the offering live this week.
The solution is delivered on a subscription basis, targeting service providers through technologies such as digital, artificial intelligence and machine learning. From a channel standpoint, the start-up is split up into two service offerings, spanning AVA and SEAK.
Specifically, AVA is a virtual concierge and support assistant designed to transform the service experience offered to IT users and IT support personnel. Meanwhile, SEAK discovers the IT assets of a business, before adding information from a number of sources to enable customers to make better decisions on assets sooner.
“Many IT service providers are grappling with feedback from customers about time wasted waiting in phone queues, ignored emails or users having to repeat themselves multiple times before getting an answer,” said Green, founder and CEO of Aportio, when speaking exclusively to Reseller News. “At the same time, these providers are constantly under pressure to reduce cost and attract and retain great staff.”
AVA and SEAK
In leveraging more than 120 years of IT service experience in the market, the Aportio team is also comprised of Susan Nemeth as CFO and Craig Porter as principal architect.
“Our experience helps bring a more intelligent approach through Aportio AVA,” Green added. “AVA gets to know the end-customer and their business and grows with it, learning over time to take on more service tasks, freeing valuable staff to focus more on higher value activities.
“Much more than a bot, in one simple fully integrated platform AVA delivers chat, knowledge search, automated workflow and virtual assistant services, providing foolproof, informed interaction, that is pre-configured for IT service providers to maximise efficiency and speed to benefit.”
According to Green – who was inducted into the Reseller News Hall of Fame in 2015 – AVA learns about services and customer needs, logging every interaction and storing information for instant access, ensuring the technology can tap into relevant data 24 hours a day.
“An informed service like AVA reduces frustration and improves the service experience,” Green explained. “AVA can take on simple ‘how do I’ tasks, start processes like quotes and on-site requests, provisioning new services, and seamlessly transitions to a service representative should the request require extra attention.”
From a technology perspective, AVA integrates with existing systems and can start improvements in less than a week, with the solution pre-configured and pre-populated to handle over 200 common IT service scenarios.
“Customers can continue to interact in the same way but AVA will be there solving their problems faster and improving user satisfaction,” Green added.
“With AVA handling the bulk of first level enquiries efficiently, your workforce are free to focus on improving service and helping your business grow.” Furthermore, and as explained by Green, SEAK provides a “lower cost, fast and secure” outcome through an automated deployment approach, backed up by a data integration engine and self-service model.
The offering integrates with AVA to make user assets and entitlement information available as part of problem solving and service provisioning.
“AVA (and any human agent involved in service delivery) can see what device, software and access rights the user currently has, and accelerates the speed to outcome as a result,” Green added.