Proactive makes sense in a competitive market

April 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment

We heard this morning that Adventi have gone. This is clearly a blow both for the industry and especially for Adventi’s customers. We would really like to wish all the staff at Adventi the best. For the company’s customers, just as we did very successfully at the beginning of the year when RFL Group also went down, we will be happy to provide short term support in a variety of ways while you work out what you are going to do and who is best suited for your long term IT needs.

On a more positive note we’ve noticed a lot of activity in the Glasgow IT support market, with more and more companies looking for a something a that works a bit more in line with their business needs. In most cases we are being told that the traditional support models, where it gets fixed only after its broken, is costing companies too much in lost productivity and revenue, especially when they are under constant pressure from their customers to deliver better service. One new customer told us that while an hour with a server down is just about bearable, the knock on effect on their ability to deliver service to their customers equates to about a working day. In a highly competitive, aggressive market our customer cannot afford that luxury.

We’ve always known that proactive IT support is the right way to maintain something, but we had not worked through just how much the knock on effect of just an hour’s downtime is on a business. It’s also really refreshing to meet a company that really understands the value of its IT to the business. It’s even nicer to be the Glasgow IT support company they chose because, in their considered and we think expert opinion, we deliver the best IT support for their needs.

Filed Under: Blog-2 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Adventi IT Support – What does the future hold?

April 20, 2010 By 2 Comments

More bad news this week for jobs in Scotland which is disappointing to say the least.

One of the firms making the news was the IT support company Adventi (made up of Adventi, Scotsys and Integral Arm) who are based in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Bellshill which went in to administration on Thursday.

Whilst the company is still trading as they look for a buyer, they have cut staff numbers by 50% from 44 to 22.

The administrators are very optimistic on finding a buyer and hopefully they can secure this very soon to enable the business to take care of its IT support commitments.

It’s crucial that as many companies as possible continue to trade to protect their Clients and to provide quality competition in the Scottish marketplace which in reality, is fairly small in real terms.

There are many comments in the news that it was the VAT office inflexibility which precipitated the administration, however, the £500k loss a year or two earlier may also have been a particularly significant factor.

There are many IT companies in Scotland and England looking to take advantage of the situation in various ways, however, I personally hope Adventi can continue in whatever form and provide uninterrupted service to their Clients.

We wish the team at Adventi all the best in the coming days and months (particularly those who are looking for new jobs ).

Links to various news articles:

http://business.scotsman.com/industry/Adventi-goes-into-administration.6233993.jp

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7100715.ece

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/glasgow_and_west/8626033.stm

http://www.heraldscotland.com/business/corporate-sme/administrators-take-over-at-adventi-as-new-buyer-sought-1.1021292

Filed Under: Blog-2 Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

It’s more than just a big hooray

March 23, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Some of you will notice a few things happening on our website this week as we launch some major updates to the content. In the grand scale of things, we are only a Glasgow based IT support company but we like to think of ourselves as real innovators in the way that we work and think about our customers.

We have always thought of our customers both long standing and new as the best way of describing what it is that we do and why it is so important for organisations these days. So rather than continue to have website and other marketing material that are a big hooray about us, we thought that the big hooray is actually about our customers and how their businesses benefit by working with us.

Our marketing company agree and we’ve spent the last while working up all the new content.  In essence our big story is about the lack of downtime and the total reliability of our customers’ IT systems. That’s what we do after all, we help other organisations have better and more reliable systems through our proactive IT support and IT services model.

So the big departure for us from the IT support norm is that the website is really about our customers, what we do for them and most importantly of all, how our customers in Glasgow and across the rest of Scotland feel about the IT support we provide them.

We are exceptionally proud of what we do and how much of a difference it makes to our customers businesses, so it’s really exciting from our perspective to be able to let them tell their stories about how we work with them. We hope you think so too.

Filed Under: Blog-2 Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

OCD Survey Results – Compiled by Microsoft

November 16, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Every quarter Microsoft ask Gold Partners (the highest partner accreditation you can get with Microsoft) like OCD  to take part in the Microsoft CSAT survey.

The survey is compiled by a completely independent organisation and its purpose is to measure many things including:

  • Quality of Support
  • Quality of Sales advice
  • What Clients want that we don’t offer at present?

We are very proud to report the results placed us at 20% above other gold partners for our quality of support and for our sales and business advice.  We are very proud of this and it continues the trend from previous surveys.  

We state that we are Obsessed with service and we are because it’s the one thing that organisations want from their IT support provider, prompt, reliable, effective service and our whole business is built on offering the best there is, so it’s nice when the team are acknowledged and recognised for delivering what we promise.

Rest assured, we will continue to work hard on delivering higher and more effective levels of service to ensure that we continue to deliver what our customers want and to remain demonstrably at least 20 percent better than our competitors

You also asked that we provide the following services:

  • Out of hours support (Support before 9am and after 5pm)
  • The ability to log, examine and close calls via your own Client access area on the web
  • We are happy to announce that both of these services will go live at the end of January 2010.

It’s fantastic to see such positive feedback from you and it’s great to introduce services that add real value to your organisation. The team work very hard not just on their technical ability to deliver the best solutions, but their interpersonal skills so we communicate with you effectively and have conversations in English rather that technical jargon.  We’re not in the business of trying to impress Clients with the number of acronyms we can use, we prefer to keep the conversations simple, to the point and leave you safe in the knowledge that we are taking care of your IT which lets you concentrate on running your business.

A big thank you to everyone who took part in the survey, we had a response rate of well over 50%.  It shows how much ‘buy in’ there is to our relationship with you as the average response rate achieved by other gold partners is in the region of 10%. 

Speak soon,

Kevin

Filed Under: feedback, service Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,