Behind every customer facing business there is a support team, basically keeping the show on the road and with Resolution IT there is no exception.
Debbie Exall heads up the Business Support team: ‘We play a far bigger role than the obvious of paying the bills to make sure the lights stay switched on. We take as much of the administrative burden off the engineers and service desk team as we can, allowing them to maximise their time spent on helping our clients.
As a team, we have to have an extensive knowledge of all the products we supply to our clients, as we source and order them all. We always research where we can get them for the best possible price. Once the goods arrive, and there is often a steady supply of trucks and vans pulling up outside our offices, we take control of the goods, allocating them to the relevant engineer.
We look after all the billing of invoices, as well as all our clients’ software licencing; making sure they are up-to-date and liaising between the client and the account manager to see whether the licences need to be renewed. We pride ourselves on giving our clients ample notice on licence renewals so there are no last-minute surprises.
We also look after all the security awareness training for our clients, setting up phishing attacks for those who have requested it. We set up the systems which send out emails with bogus links and if any staff click on them, a report will go their team head so they can see who needs more cyber training, which we also offer. You have to have an interest in technology as we’re always looking at new software coming on to the market, seeing if it can enhance our own current systems or provide new solutions for our clients.
Very often we’re already using and have tested what we are recommending to our clients so we have 110% faith in our recommendations. As an example, we’re huge fans of Microsoft Power BI, a set of tools which allow you to take your data (often in the form of reams and reams of Excel spreadsheets) and bring it to life with interactive, beautifully presented visuals. Before we started using it, it was quite a laborious task to extract the data, bring some sense to it and then engage others with what it actually meant for the business.
The power it’s now given us has been phenomenal. I can’t stress enough how incredibly useful it is to be able to plug in to a variety of systems, extract the data and then bring those statistics to life. You don’t have to be a statistician to understand the data so it’s brought a real understanding of us as a business down to a much more understandable level which of course is hugely empowering for us all. We know where we’re going and what we need to do.
We also use digital signatures a lot which has been a real time-saver. The ability to electronically sign for something speeds up processes enormously and of course cuts down on paper usage. And professional HR software – which allows us to keep all our staff details in one place, is compliant with GDPR and is very easy to set up and use. There’s a self-service side to it too so you can go in and update your own details without delaying time by involving others. Plus, we use an accounting system which has made it so much easier for our forecasting and budgetary needs, with the bonus that we take the data it produces and feed it into Power BI to give us insights into how the business is growing.
Being a part of the Business Support team definitely means you walk the talk of embracing technology and it’s definitely so much more than keeping the lights on!’
