Identiv Global Services (S1:E37)

October 13, 2022

Identiv Global Services (IGS) provides ecosystem partners with a highly personalized experience that goes above and beyond typical customer support. Tracy Wilson, Director of Identiv Global Services, joins us to discuss the high-touch help offered by IGS, from technology implementation to customized configurations.

Full Transcript

Voiceover (00:01):
You're listening to Humans in Tech. Our podcast explores today's most transformative technology, and the trends of tomorrow, bringing together the brightest minds in and outside of our industry. We unpack what's new in physical access, identity verification, cybersecurity, and IoT ecosystems. We reach beyond the physical world, discuss our digital transformation as a species, and dive into the emerging phygital experience. Join us on our journey as we discover just how connected the future will be, and how we will fit into that picture. Your host is Leigh Dow VP of Global Marketing at Identiv.

Leigh Dow (00:43):
Thank you for joining us, today we're talking with Tracy Wilson, Director Identiv Global Services. Tracy, it's really great to have you on today to discuss an unsung hero that we should talk about much more than we do, IGS.

Tracy Wilson (00:57):
Thank you, I'm really, really excited to be here, Leigh.

Leigh Dow (01:00):
First let's start with what is Identiv Global Services?

Tracy Wilson (01:04):
Well, Identiv Global Services, we are a team that assists our customers with tasks and requests that go beyond the normal support needs that you would get with customers. Whenever you purchase a piece of technology, you're almost always provided with support, but that support doesn't normally go into the details of something like an implementation, or any kind of deep dive help or special configurations that a customer might need. We have a fantastic tech support team that's our first line of help, and they often determine a cause and then provide solution information for IGS to go in and help the customers with that expanded level that they pay for. It's a little extra high touch, high help customer service that we provide for our end users.

Leigh Dow (01:54):
Well, and a lot of the folks on your team are very specialized, have a lot of high level of skill. What capabilities does IGS support?

Tracy Wilson (02:05):
So we're here, we support all of the products that Identiv brings to market for our customers. We provide implementation services, maintenance agreements, which inside those maintenance agreements we come in and we do service level supports either two to four times a year, or however many times a year that the customer would like. We provide upgrades, migrations from one system to another, so if we have a customer that has an old access control system and they want to migrate over to Velocity, we come in and help them pull the database information out, get into Velocity, and try to keep it running as smooth as possible.

We also provide embedded support for customers that want to have someone on site with them all the time basically running the system, making sure everything is taken care of, if there's any issues that pop up, that embedded resource knows how to fix them, or knows exactly who to go to within IGS tech support or engineering to get the help that they need and keep that customer happy and running as well as possible.

Leigh Dow (03:08):
Well, I understand that partners are a really big part of the IGS ecosystem. Can you tell us more about that aspect of what you do.

Tracy Wilson (03:15): Partners bring in Identiv to fulfill customer requirements on special security projects and physical security projects, and those projects can range from access control on a small number of doors, to a large overarching physical access initiative for an end user that includes access control, video and more. So our partners are trained on how to install Velocity, but because they don't typically work with it on a daily basis, they have Identiv Global Services for additional support and knowledge. The partners work with our sales team to bring us in and provide the best implementation that we can for our customer, and having a partner that is a champion of our products is essential to ensuring that we stay at the forefront of end user selection for access control.

Leigh Dow (04:02):
Got it, okay. So how long has the IGS program been in operation at Identiv, and how is it evolving with your leadership?

Tracy Wilson (04:13):
So Mark Allen actually started the group in 2004. He realized that we were leaving a ton of money on the table and we could deliver these enhanced services and customer products to customers who really, really needed it. Through partnership with tech support we're working to ensure that our IGS engineers have a thorough understanding of the Identiv product line prior to coming into the team. So they'll start out in tech support, learn everything that there is to know about our products, and then they promote up into IGS. It gives us a leg up on getting resources ready to send to a customer location. So rather than bringing in someone who may have access control background but not necessarily Identiv technical knowledge, we have that edge of someone who knows our products, and in most cases they actually know some of the customers that we're working with as well.

So with my team, we are expanding the actual team itself, we have an excellent project manager who has revamped how we actually receive requests that are coming in from sales to ensure that we don't drop anything. We were getting emails and now we're going through an actual Salesforce request system, so that's been put in place. I have collaboration meetings with IGS to talk about how we can expand our services and better support our customers. Not only that, but bring in the information that we need to share with tech support and engineering on what customers are asking for so we can make those feature requests happen in the future, and also any additional neat development that we do within our team, we can resell that to other customers.

Leigh Dow (05:53):
Oh, okay, interesting. So what inspires you the most about today's IGS team?

Tracy Wilson (05:58):
We have such a great team, and the biggest thing that I love about our team is they are very collaborative. When you're an engineer, engineers have a tendency to basically target fixate on what they're doing. They've got their own assignment, and they drown everything out and they don't talk to each other. Our team, we share information. If there's something going on, we get the team together and I'm like, "All right gang, how do we fix this?" And typically there's one or two people that have seen the problem, or have some ideas, and we collaborate and talk. And with this team there's nobody that feels like they are better than the other members of the team, it's just like a little family. We're always together, we're always talking, and they're a really cool team. And we're actually going to start an IGS knowledge video library where different team members are going to discuss specialized implementations that they have worked on, and knowledge that they've gleaned over time.

Leigh Dow (06:55):
Oh, I love that.

Tracy Wilson (06:56):
Yeah, so Shane Brown specifically, the next one we're going to do is he's going to talk about how to properly set up and support clustering, which is important to a lot of our customers, and that's something that not everybody on the team knows how to do and support, so once we get that video done we're actually going to put it into this library that we can share with all of our Identiv resources who are interested in learning, and in some cases share videos with partners and customers who maybe put those on our customer facing website and say, "Hey, if you're interested in clustering, here's a really cool video on what it is, how we do it, and how to support it."

Leigh Dow (07:31):
I was telling someone the other day that if you were to go on TikTok and look at hashtags for access control and physical access control, it's interesting how many installers are doing really quick videos on either challenges that they're coming across in the installation, or some of them are very almost OCD about their wiring and they're really proud of it and want to show it off, how organized it is. But those really quick hit videos are very popular, even on TikTok.

Tracy Wilson (08:09):
Yeah, so it might be a good idea to maybe just have the whole video and then possibly chop it up into smaller portions and say, hey, if you're interested in this part, look at this video, if you're interested in this part, look at this video, because I know people have a short attention span and maybe a 30 minute video talking about clustering might not be a lot of fun.

Leigh Dow (08:24):
Yeah. Anything else you want to share with us about just that highly personalized experience that IGS offers?

Tracy Wilson (08:31):
We're always looking for ways to enhance our customer experience. So we like to listen to the customers and our partners and the sales team and tech support and everybody, we want to know how to improve current performance, expand our capabilities, and we want to be able to support the customer in any way possible. So we're always out there trying to learn and grow, so any specialized request that we get from customers we're always pretty excited to look at and work on.

Leigh Dow (09:03):
Excellent. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to share all that great information with us and shine a spotlight on IGS.

Tracy Wilson (09:11):
Thank you for having me, I really, really enjoy doing this.

Leigh Dow (09:13):
Oh, of course, we'll definitely have you back for a future episode.

Tracy Wilson (09:16):
Okay.

Leigh Dow (09:17):
And for our audience, if you like this podcast, please like and subscribe

Voiceover (09:20):
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Physical security, identity verification, the IoT, the hyper-connectivity of our lives will only grow more pervasive as technology becomes more automated and experiences more augmented. It's up to us to preserve our humanity and use new tools and trends for good. The only question is, are we up for the challenge?