Know how Syncro leads innovative strategies to enhance MSP operations through AI-driven solutions.
Dee, can you share insights into your role as Chief Product Officer at Syncro? How does your background and leadership influence product strategy and innovation?
My approach to product is deeply rooted in customer focus, continuous learning, and drawing inspiration from diverse industries to stay at the forefront of technological innovations. I have led teams and product strategy for over 20 years, including 6 years at Continuum. During my tenure as the head of product at Continuum, I had the privilege of steering our team through a transformative period of innovation. This journey resulted in significant success for our company and even more important, it delivered substantial value to our customers. We delivered products and services that helped accelerate their growth, increase their end-user satisfaction, and improve their bottom line. This experience has been instrumental in shaping my leadership style and product strategy approach here at Syncro.
Please provide a high-level overview of Syncro’s core solutions?
What specific challenges do these solutions address for your customers?
Syncro unifies Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) and Professional Services Automation (PSA) for Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and internal IT teams. By providing a single solution for these critical needs, Syncro provides a higher level of integration without unnecessary complexity helping partners operate profitably, efficiently, and securely.
Our automation engine leverages AI to automate routine workflows and surface actionable information, elevating technician productivity to new heights. Syncro dramatically reduces the hours spent on repetitive tasks, optimizing every minute for problem-solving and empowering technicians to handle more tickets in less time. Syncro lets you deploy scripts, automate remediation, manage compliance, and handle complex billing with precision and ease.
What key benefits do Syncro’s products offer to MSPs and internal IT teams? How do they enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction?
Syncro unifies the IT management toolset, providing a unique blend of power and simplicity, with deep flexibility and customization without requiring babysitting or a difficult learning curve. Syncro’s automation engine increases a technician’s efficiency by automating routine tasks. This automation directly impacts an MSP’s and internal IT’s end-user satisfaction. Perhaps the most exciting development in the area of customer satisfaction is Syncro’s recently introduced Smart Ticket Management. By leveraging AI to understand and classify tickets, it enables technicians to resolve more tickets more effectively with less time and effort.
What unique features set Syncro apart from other platforms in the market?
How does Syncro differentiate itself from competitors?
Smart Ticket Management: By automating tasks like ticket routing, classification, and prioritization, Syncro reduces the grunt work, saving hours of technician time every week.
Billing: Syncro’s billing system gives the technician complete control, letting you set billing parameters to match any type of contract. Once you’ve set templates, Syncro automates billing, pulling in time logs and automatically ensuring accuracy.
Scripting: Syncro’s scripting engine lets the technician deploy custom PowerShell scripts, or scripts from our vetted library. Unlike many other platforms, Syncro gives the technician the power to use platform variables in your scripts.
What are some of the most common challenges MSPs encounter when they come to Syncro? How do your solutions alleviate these pain points?
Some of the common challenges we hear from our new MSP partners are escalating labor costs, talent shortages, growing their businesses profitably, and supporting complicated and hard-to-use software platforms.
Syncro addresses these challenges with a highly accessible, easy-to-use but powerful platform that automates many tasks that consume their staff’s time. Our focus is helping our MSPs scale their business without the need to add more resources by amplifying a technician’s ability to get more work done in less time.
How do you see AI shaping customer engagement strategies at Syncro?
Could you walk us through how AI insights influence the development of new features?
Syncro is actively integrating AI into our product suite to enhance technician efficiency and boost end-user satisfaction. Our AI-powered features include:
- Automatic ticket categorization and prioritization
- Suggested resolutions for common issues
- Ticket (customer) sentiment analysis
- Natural language search capabilities
These help our customers streamline their workload management, respond more effectively to urgent matters, and provide tailored support to users requiring extra attention. Unlike other solutions that are essentially bolting on AI solutions to their existing functionality, we are doing the hard work of infusing AI directly into our solution. In many cases, this requires us to develop entirely new software to support innovative AI-powered capabilities, but the benefits of this approach are streamlined workflows, greater efficiency gains, and a superior user experience.
We are also using AI insights in our tooling to help shape and improve customer engagement. We have revamped our product documentation and support chat to incorporate AI capabilities that help us understand our customers’ issues and questions to be able to craft a smoother overall experience. We are also utilizing AI to analyze usage patterns to ensure quick time to value for our customers, so they are getting the most out of our solution.
What trends in generative AI are you most excited about?
How is Syncro aligning its products with these advancements to stay ahead of the curve?
Syncro is leveraging some of the latest AI advancements helping MSPs deliver a better customer experience. For example, Syncro’s Smart Ticket management leverages AI to provide sentiment analysis and the ability to suggest solutions. We are leveraging generative AI to help MSPs gain more insight into the health of their customers’ computing infrastructures. The focus is on preventing problems to reduce workloads while delivering a better outcome for an MSPs’ customers. As a product leader, I look for areas where we can apply AI to have a strategic and significant impact on our MSPs’ business. It is about taking a business perspective on how AI can move the needle for our customers.
I am personally very excited about the work and innovation that is happening around more cognitive AI. The ability for a model to reliably stop and think, and not just generate learned patterns based on past data, is pretty incredible. I feel like we are at the beginning of such a transformative era. At Syncro, we’re actively engaged in this revolution. We have a dedicated team working daily on AI prototypes and solutions, and we’ve invested in company-wide AI training. Our goal is to leverage these cutting-edge capabilities to enhance our products, improve our efficiency, and ultimately make our customers more successful.
How do you anticipate the role of MSPs evolving in the coming years?
What innovations will be necessary for them to remain competitive?
MSPs always have to evolve to meet change needs in the market and the coming years will be ripe with change. They will continue to need to be security-focused, managing hybrid environments, and they will need to leverage AI and automation to drive efficiencies and profitability.
I also believe that they will need to make sure to keep a very personal and human relationship with their clients. Whether it’s just to build trust or to help their clients understand and adopt AI, I believe there might be some backlash for companies that try to automate out all human interaction, especially in supporting small businesses. The rise of AI may actually increase the value of genuine human interaction in the MSP-client relationship. More importantly, AI will give time back to MSPs enabling them to build closer and more meaningful relationships with their customers.
Dee Zepf,
Chief Product Officer, Syncro
Dee Zepf, Chief Product Officer at Syncro, is passionately dedicated to user-centric product development. With a focus on innovation, Dee ensures that every product iteration is designed to empower partners to achieve operational excellence. Through her leadership, the company consistently delivers solutions that meet the evolving needs of its users, reinforcing her commitment to enhancing the user experience at every stage.
