CommentSold is a live-selling platform that provides retailers with an end-to-end sales solution. It empowers over 7000 small to mid-sized retailers with support at every stage, from onboarding and strategic guidance to cutting-edge go-live technology and efficient backend solutions for inventory management, invoicing, and fulfillment. 

Being a fully remote organization, CommentSold’s IT team relies on AssetSonar to ensure that their employees are always provided with the equipment they need to do their jobs. 

Shifting focus from spreadsheets to AssetSonar

Before AssetSonar, CommentSold was using spreadsheets for IT asset management. This homegrown process was inefficient and prone to inaccuracies. These limitations made it challenging for the IT team to maintain an accurate inventory database. 

Kent Lyle, IT Manager at CommentSold, shared with us that their manual system was failing to deliver critical insights. Due to this, it became a high priority to implement a tool that made it easier for them to track IT equipment. Their focus was on finding a software through which they could easily tag devices and check them out to the relevant employees.

After considering several options, CommentSold opted for AssetSonar to track and manage their IT devices. This proved to be a significant step towards the management’s goal of keeping their employees happy and ensured that their remote workforce had access to the relevant tools at all times. 

Kent described that there were key factors that helped them choose AssetSonar. The ease of software deployment and the ability to get it up and running quickly was one of the major differentiating factors. 

‘AssetSonar is one of the best pieces of software I have ever used of this type,’ mentioned Kent. 

Kent elaborated that other key drivers for choosing AssetSonar were its Google Workspace and Zendesk integrations. Having these integrations meant that they could seamlessly integrate AssetSonar into their existing technology stack without having to make any changes or upgrades. 

Tracking IT assets to optimize usage and reduce losses

Initially, CommentSold didn’t have a process in place to track life cycles of their IT assets. Since they lacked a mechanism to accurately monitor their hardware devices, it was impossible to manage every stage of their lifecycle. Consequently, a large number of their IT devices didn’t get recycled and were just being kept in storage. One of the most important matters of business for CommentSold’s IT team was to start tracking these IT devices accurately which eventually led to managing their life cycles too. 

With AssetSonar, Kent and his team can now closely monitor the usage of all devices deployed to the employees so by the end of every fiscal year, they can easily dispose off the devices that have reached the end of their lifespan. Since they now record all device information on AssetSonar, it allows them to procure assets more efficiently as well. With accurate information on which and how many devices are being retired, they can easily come up with a replacement plan without any disruptions to the business operations. 

Since CommentSold is a fully remote organization, one of the key problem areas was device loss. In the past, there had been instances where devices had gone missing or were not returned when employees left the organization. Siloed or incorrect information on assets prevented visibility which resulted in frequent asset loss. Now, with AssetSonar, Kent keeps track of these devices and is able to take actions to ensure that these devices are returned whenever employees exit the company. 

‘Now we know exactly where our equipment is. So if a device loss incident occurs, we can investigate it and are able to take care of it,’ elaborated Kent. 

He also makes sure that any time a device is returned, he checks its status to determine if it can be repurposed instead of procuring new devices. This strategy is saving CommentSold a significant amount of money in the long run. 

Optimizing service desk operations and boosting efficiency with Zendesk 

‘Zendesk is really important to me. I have worked on Zendesk previously as well so AssetSonar’s integration with Zendesk was the key motivator for us,’ says Kent. 

Previously, there was no single source of truth or central repository that kept track of status, custody, and key information of an IT asset. Whenever a service desk ticket came in, there was no easy method for CommentSold’s IT team to get all relevant information required to resolve a ticket. Since the team didn’t have updated information on which devices were assigned to every employee, they had to ask employees for their devices’ serial numbers and then had to look up the purchase invoices to accurately pinpoint the device. This entire process usually took up more than an hour and involved a lot of back and forth between the employee and the helpdesk agent. 

Now with AssetSonar’s widget on Zendesk application, all the relevant device information is readily available for Kent and his team. They have accurate details on the status and custody of every IT asset and don’t have to manually search for this information. It now saves them up to 80% time depending upon the type of ticket they are working on. This process that previously used to take up more than an hour can now be finished within 15 minutes. Additionally, the accuracy of finding out the asset data has also been increased to at least 90% for CommentSold’s IT team. 

Kent shared with us that resolving their Zendesk tickets quickly is significant for them as it frees up their time to focus on other projects. They have managed to reduce the ticket resolution time by over 20%. 

To further enhance their ticket resolution process, they now also add the invoices of every asset in the details. This means that for every device that comes in for a repair, the IT team can view its lifecycle status along with any historical repair data on the device. They can also view information on the previous custodians of the asset and all this information combined allows them to take well-informed actions on the asset.  

As a bottomline, AssetSonar and Zendesk integration helps CommentSold’s IT team to enhance their service management capabilities, all the while improving productivity and reducing mean-time-to-repair (MTTR). 

Enabling workflows with AssetSonar’s custom features 

Since implementing AssetSonar, Kent has built an end-to-end process to fetch device usage information into AssetSonar. By deploying the AssetSonar Agent on all their devices, they are now able to import all hardware and system details from their machines. Kent remarked on the success of AssetSonar Agent and excitedly shared how they went from having barely anything tracked to now not only having all their assets tracked in the software but they are helping other teams do the same as well. He shared how his team is now helping the company’s QA department to switch from their existing asset tracking system to AssetSonar. 

‘It has been extremely easy to use the deployment of Agent. I can’t say enough about how successful AssetSonar has been,’ says Kent. 

Another thing that Kent loves about AssetSonar is its easy-to-use modules and customizable options. He mentioned how his team adds custom fields wherever needed and is able to customize the dashboard to their needs. 

‘We like how customizable AssetSonar is. We can customize what we want to see related to data and put it into AssetSonar,’ says Kent. 

While on the topic of customization, Kent also highlighted that he makes custom reports for the company’s finance department and how these reports have proven to be significant and helpful to their business operations. 

The way forward with AssetSonar

Now that Kent has built workflows around hardware asset management, the next step for him and his team is to dive into software asset management with AssetSonar. 

‘I want to be able to track licenses a bit better with AssetSonar’s software license management capabilities,’ remarked Kent. 

Kent shared that he loves the easy check-in/checkout process, and the ability to tie assets to individuals and looks forward to experimenting with more AssetSonar modules in the future.