If you are a company having problems with your servers or printers or even Outlook, Calgary-based IT services firm CTECH wants to be able to answer your calls for help with a 90 second guarantee.
“If you have a problem, you want support right now. Waiting on the phone for 5 minutes is too long,” said Carl Fransen, founder and president of CTECH. “The 90 Second Support Model is designed around the principle of making our clients our business partners.”
Fransen wanted to give CTECH a competitive edge when deciding to offer a 90 second SLA.
“I wanted to prove to the market that there is an IT firm out there that actually wants to grow and work with [their clients]. I want IT to be seen as an operational cost instead of a capital cost. I want to show them that we are not the big bad, we are not the black hole but that we want to make sure that when you need support you get support,” noted Fransen.
There are 25 certified IT technicians that are available to clients 24-hours a day that promise to respond to 90 percent of the support calls in 90 seconds. Electronic support requests are answered in one hour or less. The amount of support calls that CTECH gets varies from a dozen to a hundred per day.
Fransen believes his success comes from the fact that CTECH is completely private cloud-based, which gives him the flexibility to expand and contract easily based on current market conditions.
But before being able to implement the 90-second SLA, Fransen needed to automate CTECH’s backend processes.
For example, he implemented a 24-hour monitoring system that would proactively fix any issues before they become a problem. If it can’t fix the issue, the system automatically transfers it over to CTECH’s help desk system.
“It will report … [the] problem and the fixes tried … then it goes to level 1 support tech. With my help desk system combined with my monitoring system, I thought to myself, what if I create this 90 second support policy where all my clients, 24 hours a day, can now contact CTECH via the phone, via our onboard agent, via our portal site or via email,” Fransen added. “With all the information that my backend system has collected, anyone of my staff, even though they may not have talked to the client directly, has access to all the information they need.”
In creating the 90-second support policy, Fransen learned that it was really important to listen to the client.
“They will tell you exactly what they need and how they want to be talked to. The process is constantly evolving and changing based on their feedback. At the end of day, I don’t really care about technology … but that the client is satisfied with their IT needs,” he explained.
Since implementing the 90 Second Support Model, Fransen has seen an increase in CTECH’s support work, customer stickiness, increase in technician satisfaction and efficiency along with a reduction in stress levels.
“I am building CTECH to be next generation IT firm where my model will be copied eventually in the future, and right now I am taking the time to prove it and making sure it works,” he added.
