Over the last few years Pro Drive has invested significantly in changing the way we provide our IT support service. Our Operations Director Chris Morrell has taken to the blog to explain how and why.
Recently I wrote a blog on how to choose a new IT support provider. It is a crowded marketplace and it can be time consuming and confusing working out how IT companies differ and whether they are right for you.
There are however companies taking a fresh and different approach – we believe Pro Drive is one of those so here is some background on Pro Drive’s philosophy of delivering IT support and how we are confident it delivers radically different results.
Our approach is based on two key points:
- Nobody wants to speak to IT support, doing so means you have a problem and that means your work is interrupted or, worse still, you cannot work at all.
- When you do have to speak to an IT helpdesk you want two things to happen; your issue resolved as soon as humanly possible and excellent communication.
So we have built our service offering specifically to address them.
Stop wasting your time calling IT support
Our first aim was to ensure people do not need to call us (at least not for IT issues, we still love speaking to our clients). People only call IT Support if there is an issue so, by preventing the issues in the first place, they do not waste their time calling us.
How do we do this:
- We spend significant time proactively making sure everything on our clients’ networks is tip-top and ship shape. This involves reviewing all our clients’ systems and making sure they align to our standards. Something that is badly configured or has an out-of-date configuration will go wrong more often. This is the key to it all and what we believe really sets us apart – in fact, it’s so important we have a person dedicated to it.
- We regularly visit client sites. In part to check onsite technology as part of our reviews, but also to speak to people using the tech to help them and understand their challenges. In a world where tech is becoming more complicated, we do not believe your IT company should be hiding behind a phone.
- We standardise everything to make sure that all services are configured the same way, conforming to best practices, for all our clients with exceptions to the standard these are documented.
- We regularly review these standards in a standards committee to keep them up to date.
- Our standards include the security posture of our clients’ systems to make sure they are as secure as possible and, by continually reviewing, we keep them up to date with the changing cyber security landscape and aware of any risks.
- We have checklists for every service we deploy to make sure it is always done the same way.
- We collaborate with our clients to ensure they can budget to keep their systems up to date and secure and at the same time avoid unexpected costs.
By following the above we reduce IT issues by as much as possible, the metric we use to measure this is Reactive Hours per End-user per Month (RHEM). This is, on average, how much is spent dealing with reactive IT issues, thus causing frustration and interrupting work. Our current RHEM rating is 0.29 which is world class.
Preventing downtime prevents costs
Now we have dramatically reduced the need for our clients to seek support we do accept that things can still occasionally go wrong, so our next focus to ensure we resolve the issue as quickly as possible.
How do we do that?
- We are obsessive about documentation, making sure its accurate and up to date. Confusion wastes time and poor or no documentation causes confusion.
- If we solve an issue, we document it and identify the root cause. We make sure that we should never have to solve a problem twice.
- We ensure our staff know all our client’s core systems inside out. Our staff have training as a key KPI in their development plans and every member of the team completes a minimum of two weeks of training per year.
All this means we resolve issues quickly. The business KPI we use to track this is Mean Time to Resolution (MTR) – This is the average time it takes us to close a ticket. Currently, our MTR is 22.2 minutes which is world class.
Communication is king
Finally, we have to make sure that we communicate brilliantly
How do we do this?
- We only hire awesome people! Our recruitment process is heavily focused on ensuring only good communicators make it through.
- We constantly reinforce the importance of excellent communication in every ticket review, the daily teams huddle and our weekly whole company meetings.
- All of our team are responsible for calling for feedback on completed work and for support cases, how well it was resolved and the client experience. As well as collecting feedback, this gives the team direct experience of what our clients require from us.
We use NetPromoter Score (NPS) to gauge our client’s satisfaction with our service. Our NPS at time of writing is 100 which is world class.
What does all this mean for our clients?
- By following the above points we ensure our clients don’t have many IT issues, this means they are free to get on with their jobs, not getting constantly interrupted by IT not working and slowing them down.
- We keep them safe and secure to help prevent cyber security issues risking the reputation of their business
- When they do have to get in touch about an issue we have highly trained, highly competent engineers ready to resolve the issue as soon as possible and keep our clients up to date on what is happening.
- They have a lower overall cost of ownership for their technology. For lawyers, accountants and financial services firms, people are the most important and costly asset. By removing lost time caused by tech going wrong, and giving them the confidence to use it better, they have happier, more productive staff which delivers a huge return on investment.
Ultimately, it means our clients get a world-class service so they can go and deliver a world-class service to their clients.
