You may have noticed us to be very quiet as of late, we have been busy at the drawing board developing a new service plan for our clients and here’s why:
After our first year in business, we realized that we were not truly delivering the type of service which we envisioned when we set out to start this company. While we have transitioned what was a very reactive service into proactive monitoring and management, there was still something missing. Being firm believers in continuous improvement, we spent the last few months developing a service plan that could fill in the gaps and we ended up with what we believe is a vast improvement with simplicity at its core.
Here were some of the negatives of our old service plan:
- Too many optional items: Our legacy plans had too many optional items making the decision process long and tedious. Critical and what should be non-negotiable items such as anti-virus and off-site backup were optional items creating decision hurdles which at times led to gaps in protection.
- Basic and unstructured consulting services: Our legacy plans do offer technology consulting but it is done at a very basic level only analyzing outliers in our client IT environments. The process also lacked any structure or standardization.
- No standard pricing mechanic: All legacy plans are based on the number of users but many other factors were allowed to impact the overall price. This has led to unclear pricing for both present monthly bills and future monthly bills (where staff changes in the client organization)
- No method to alleviate Microsoft Office licensing challenges: Something we have noticed at almost all clients is a lack of standardized Microsoft Office licensing and/or poor quality email services.
Here is how we fixed these major items:
- We removed almost all optional items from our service plan. The only option remaining is remote-only or on-site and remote service plans. Anti-virus is included and off-site backup is included (No more pay per GB). This ensures that clients are always protected and don’t have to worry about what brand of anti-virus, or how many GBs they need to backup.
- We completely redesigned our consulting methodology. We have broken consulting into two categories: standards alignment and vCIO. Standards alignment is a frequent evaluation of client IT infrastructures against a defined and documented list of standards and best practices we have developed in-house. We then take the output of that process and produce a technology summary document which highlights all of the major categories in the IT infrastructure and defines an associated risk level. The technology summary is simplified and easy to understand for client management and decision makers.
- We have done away with all of the complexity and made it very simple. There is a set price for every user per month. That’s it! Every user who is added or removed, increases or decreases the total monthly cost.
- Office 365 Business Premium is included in all new service plans whether you use all of it, some of it, or none of it. All primary users will have Office 365 and fully licensed Microsoft Office suite. Users who do not have an organizational workstation will be given Office 365 Business Essentials (does not include full Microsoft Office). This means no more worrying about Microsoft Office licensing on new computer purchases or on upgrades for staff computers. Clients will automatically receive the latest version of Microsoft Office.
Our goal is to consistently provide the best value that we can to our clients and while this is a long journey, we feel this takes us another step closer.
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Contact us for more information and a quote if interested in upgrading from your current service plan!