Background

Wensauer Com-Systeme is a medium-sized full-service provider for professional communication technology and IT system solutions from Grafenau in southern Germany. Around 40 employees take care of issues such as consulting, procurement of customised IT solutions as well as installation and maintenance.

In addition, the company is active in the IT specialist trade sector. About 80 per cent of the company’s customers, who come from a wide variety of industries, are located in the region within a radius of up to 60 kilometres. The remaining 20 per cent of customers are spread all over Germany. The company specialises in IT infrastructure; the range of services includes, for example, Windows server solutions, Microsoft 365 and IT security solutions.

Challenges

Before the introduction of TeamViewer, it was common practice at Wensauer Com-Systeme to travel to the customer’s site and fix problems or set up new software:

• Time- and cost-intensive on-site service
• Little flexibility for employees
• Cumbersome solution via VPN not practical

“At some point, the topic of remote maintenance came up for us, simply because it allows us to serve customers faster and saves travel time,” remembers Michael Hartl, Technical Manager at Wensauer Com-Systeme.

In 2012, he started looking for a solution that would work reliably and be easy to use. Aditionally, it should also allow persistent access to host systems such as Windows servers in addition to normal laptops and PCs. However, an initial test with a VPN solution quickly turned out to be too cumbersome.

Solution

“At that time, TeamViewer was already quite widespread, so we started using the software to quickly look at customer systems remotely in case of problems,” says Hartl. “This quickly turned out to be the ideal solution for us, also because many customers already knew TeamViewer or even had the client installed on their systems. In addition, the use of TeamViewer is more or less self-explanatory. For our support team as well as for the customers, it simply worked great right from the start.”

In the meantime, Wensauer Com-Systeme has continued to expand the use of TeamViewer step by step. “For us, TeamViewer is a central component for the remote support of our customers, the solution is practically permanently in use with us. Our current licence allows up to three connections simultaneously, and at least two of them are permanently active for remote maintenance of some kind,” says Michael Hartl. With the introduction of TeamViewer, the company was also able to expand its geographical catchment area and thus open up new business opportunities.

Wensauer’s support team members are often on the road themselves, connecting quickly and securely to their customers’ servers or PCs via TeamViewer from a mobile tablet, for example. “My personally most unusual case was once when a desperate customer called me after hours who had accidentally deleted all data during a system maintenance. However, I was just standing in the vegetable department in the supermarket. I then started TeamViewer on my smartphone and established a connection to the customer’s server. Together we were able to restore the data from the backup,” says Hartl.

In addition to this increased flexibility for employees, Wensauer was also able to adapt quite easily with TeamViewer to the changed working environment caused by the Corona pandemic. With the solution, the company can continue to provide comprehensive IT support for their customers’ employee devices, even when they work distributed from the home office.