The end of April marks 37 days since Guernsey went into lockdown and we, like all businesses, found ourselves all working remotely yet needing to continue to act as one team, not only for ourselves but also for our clients.
A team that runs a Service Desk taking hundreds of calls a day, a team that needs to be able to communicate, collaborate, share and work on documents, talk to each and see each other.
As a managed IT services provider, we were well placed to make the move to home working with no disruption to the service we provide to our valued clients. Our Service Desk saw an expected increase in the number of requests for assistance in remote access and working from home and initially this made up a large volume of our calls. Now that most companies have made arrangements to work from home we have been assisting with the same general work and support that we would normally expect, whilst also helping clients better leverage software and services, such as Microsoft Teams, that they may have been less familiar with. The team has also worked with clients to build full new remote access systems and fast-tracked migrations to cloud systems to enable improved access to systems and the ability to work from home.
Some have needed training help and we’ve offered over 20 remote training sessions, predominantly covering Microsoft Teams and Office 365, at the end of which, users have learnt some great hints, tips and quick wins.
And we’ve continued to keep clients safe, being able to remotely take those that need it, through the Cyber Essentials recertification process, through access to their systems.
When we look back on the month of April, the stats for our use of Microsoft Teams are amazing so we thought we’d share what a team of almost 40 people got up to:
- had 1,265 meeetings
- spent 1,415 hours on video calls
- spent 1,819 hours on audio calls
- sent 36,884 individual messages
- participated in 2,274 group messages
- had 7,586 one to one calls
- received 4,119 external calls to our Service Desk
Who knows how long this ‘new normal’ will last for. We’ve kept ourselves and our clients going through it. If you need any help or advice to make sure you can keep going, feel free to add to that external calls tally!
