Web Design Agency With Two Challenges
As a well established web design company based on the South Coast of England, Diligence Digital found that they were unwittingly taking on their clients IT issues, regarding IT setups, namely email account support. They also were being held back by their business phone system. Both these challenges were using up or wasting valuable company time and resource.
Westbrook Communications helped them to overcome these issues and here’s how...
Challenge 1 - End USer Support
The Brief
Like many web design companies, Diligence Digital offer website hosting and email accounts to their clients. “In the beginning this wasn’t a problem” says Adam, CEO of Diligence Digital. “We expected to help our customers setup their new email accounts that ran through our servers. However as we grew as a business and we attracted more clients, especially hosted clients, we were taking more and more calls from our customers, regarding their emails accounts.”
Westbrook Communications learned that the email accounts were not running into technical faults, they operated relatively smoothly. The problem lay with the customers expecting 24/7 technical support. “Our hosting packages include email accounts, what they didn’t include was end user technical support for them”, Adam explained. “As our client base grew so did the number of calls we received regarding simple IT setups. For example how to setup the email account on different devices is asked alot or we would take calls claiming the email account has stopped working, and after investigating it hadn’t, it was invariably a microsoft issue their end. It just got to a point where each call, would be interrupting one of the team and would be taking up 15 to 20mins of their day. When you multiple that up, it was using up a lot of valuable company time, as an aftercare service with no revenue stream.”
The Solution
Diligence Digital and Westbrook Communications brain stormed some ideas on a new process and how they two companies could work together. The solution was simple in the end. At the point of sale for hosting, clients were asked if they would like to pay for end user IT support. A new online support ticket system was created, clients were asked to log their questions via the new system, those that were paying for support, Westbrook Communications end user support services took over and acting as part of the Diligence Digital team, would deal with the support queries freeing up valuable time for the Diligence team. The cost of this service was more than covered by the new support package launched by Diligence Digital.
Challenge 2 - Limited Business Phone System
The Brief
As with many growing business’s, they start off with a single phone line. Diligence Digital was no different. The company was born from a small team and one phoneline worked ok. They had a simple setup, with a couple of handsets that allowed to transfer calls between them. “We rapidly outgrew this setup” says Adam, “Simple things became a problem, for example if you want to make a call, but the phoneline was being used on another call, you end up using your mobile phone, and as sales increased, the the phone line was being used for taking sales calls, frustrating clients who where calling us to discuss an ongoing project only to hear the engaged tone. Brilliant that we are doing so well, but flagged up we need a better way!”
The Solution
Westbrook Communications provided Diligence Digital with a hosted business phone system. Every team members desk was supplied with both a headset that plugs into the team members workstation and a traditional handset, allowing them to choose how to take the call for comfort reasons. Westbrook provided training to the Diligence Team on how to use the software on their computers, to take incoming calls and explained how to do basic tasks such as making calls, transferring calls, and how to create joint calls, so that the whole company could be in a conference call at the same time with a customer. The software easily allows Diligence to also update voicemail message and reroute incoming calls through to mobile numbers.