As we venture into the new fiscal year, Chris Payne, Director or Strategic Alliances and Technical at Pro2col reflects on our service delivery and achievements in FY 2023 - 2024. In this article, he shares key statistics, performance insights, business challenges and Pro2col's strategic plans for the future.
Having worked in the IT Channel for almost two decades, I joined Pro2col with an objective to professionalise our service offering to a ‘world-class’ level - which would give Pro2col both a strategic position unmatched by its rivals; and solidify our position as the global leaders in file transfer and data exchange.
After two full financial years, we have now invested in a number of areas which are beginning to provide benefits:
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A full team with a strong enough tenure that we can deliver a full suite of Professional and Technical Support services.
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A new customer management and ticketing system which is integrated with the wider operations of the business. Providing us with better SLA control, reporting, notification and feedback.
- An extensive reporting suite which is saving us time and providing invaluable insights where we used to be heavily reliant on spreadsheets for analysis.
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Technical Support Performance
Our Technical Support team provide first- and second-line support for fifteen solutions across ten vendors during UK office hours. In terms of tickets, we closed a total of 1,219 tickets in the previous financial year – an average of 102 per month.
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As both a Distributor and a Reseller, we strive to resolve as many tickets internally as possible without requiring the assistance of our vendor partners. This measure of success is not just one of self-reliance but one which can rely on to demonstrate our value to our customers, Channel and vendor partners alike. In 2023/24, we closed a whopping 81.48% of our tickets in-house using just our own resources.
To put this into context, of our 1,219 ticket closures, only 19 were raised with our vendor partners each month.
Service Level Agreement (SLA) & Objectives (SLO)
While our retrospective analysis tells us that our team are performing well, we make commitments to our customers by way of SLAs and SLOs, which also act as yearly targets and Key Performance Indicators (KPI). An SLA is an agreement between a provider and a customer, outlining the quality and level of service expected, and an SLO refers to a specific measurable target for the performance of a service, outlined within the SLA. Last year we set the following targets:
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All new technical support cases will be responded to within one hour of creation – inside of the timeframes defined by standard and enhanced support.
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Where a technical support case cannot be resolved by Pro2col’s first-line support team, cases will be escalated to the second-line vendor support team within the SLA resolution time.
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Resolved cases are closed and a survey sent out to gather feedback your experience with our technical support team. Our objective is to receive >95% positive feedback (rated good or excellent) over a calendar year.
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Having implemented new support desk software over a year ago, we now have the ability as a business to assess and analyse our adherence to our own targets. In terms of responding to every ticket with one hour, we achieved this in 98.22% of all cases. Process changes and improvements yet to take place mean that we cannot properly ascertain whether or not we always escalated to third-line support within our SLAs, however we are confident anecdotally that we have a similar rate of success. And finally, our target of more than 95% positive feedback was missed by a hairsbreadth. With an average score of 23.73 out of 25 across all ticket feedback, we achieved 94.92%.
Despite missing some of our objectives and aims, I am pleased with the hard work the team have put in and celebrate their ‘almost wins’ in cases where they narrowly missed out. Certainly the feedback we get from our customers tells us they do value the work we do and that often our ability to support them is crucial in their choice of supplier.
With this in mind, I will be setting the following SLOs for our Technical Support team in 2024/25.
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Pro2col shall achieve an in-house support ticket resolution rate of 85% or higher. In which vendor support at a third-line is not required and the ticket is resolved using Pro2col resources only.
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Resolved cases are closed and a survey sent out to gather feedback your experience with our technical support team. Our objective is to receive >95% positive feedback (rated good or excellent) over a financial year.
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All new technical support cases will be responded to within one hour of creation – inside of the timeframes defined by standard and premium support.
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Strategies for Technical Support Improvement
As we enter the new financial year, we begin to build our strategic objectives, department objectives and the individual targets each of our team members will carry with them throughout the year. Once again, I want to encourage an environment of continuous improvement but with an eye on attainability.
In the coming year the Technical Support team will be exploring a number of areas for improvement.
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The return of Pro2col 24/7 technical support.
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A fast-track ticket service for priority customers.
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The use of AI to free up our support team to take on the trickier tickets and increase the speed of resolution for those which are less taxing.
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Further training and development in the team to increase the wider skills base.
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The use of alternative communication methods which we do not fully embrace today such as knowledge bases, chatbots and other tools which bring both efficiencies and speedier resolutions.
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Improvements in our ability to capture feedback from customers regarding their experiences with technical support.
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SLA remedies, to both push us for better results but so that we can demonstrate to our customers that we are serious about meeting them.
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An area of improvement we have already started working on, is improving our communication with customers and vendor partners. I believe that the enemy of any partnership is lack of visibility and so we have started a programme of providing consistent reporting to our vendor partners on the number of tickets we resolve, speed of resolution and how many are escalated. This is something we are starting to roll out to our customers as one of the many benefits found in our new Premium Technical Support package.
Professional Services Performance
Professional Services are those services carried out by our consultancy team. This includes all pre-sales work, including: demonstrations, proof-of-concepts, RFIs; post-sales work, including: installation, customisation, upgrades, audits and any other chargeable work; and Managed Services.
For our Professional Services team, it has been a very busy year with a combined output of 1,532 hours over the course of a year. Nearly 300 of that was in June alone, with the fallout of the MOVEit vulnerabilities being that many customers sought our help upgrading and patching their solutions.
I am particularly proud of the work the team did during this period of time for two reasons. The number of hours recorded surpassed the available hours for the month, which means in some cases our consultants were working early hours, late at night or on weekends to ensure that our customers were operational. Secondly, as a business which support fifteen different solutions, not all of our team are trained on all solutions, but the whole team rolled up their sleeves to provide help. Much was learned in those summer months but more importantly, much was achieved.
As our service offering develops and evolves, we are seeing a significant move in our business towards the sale of services, which is both fulfilling from my perspective but creating a serious revenue stream inside of the business which solidifies the integrity we have among our customers and the marketplace as the leaders of the file transfer and data exchange marketplace. I have spent some time reviewing rivals both at home and internationally and while we are not the only ones with this niche, I am confident we are the strongest.
Strategies for Professional Services Improvements
And yet it doesn’t end there. We have much more to achieve in this space and lots more ideas to come to fruition in the short and longer terms.
Some of the exciting changes to look forward to in the coming year include:
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Improved training offering both with regard to solutions and our solution-agnostic Certified File Transfer Professional® course, which has gone through a revamp recently to modernise its content and presentation.
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The launch and evolution of our Premium Managed Service which adds a number of entitlements onto our existing Managed Service packages to provide even more value to our customers.
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A new comprehensive audit service which will take the idea of a short health check into a full-days activity in which we really delve into the inner workings of customer file transfer environments.
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Improvement to the documentation and thus interaction we have with our customers leading up to and during engagement.
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A programme of seeking feedback from customers post-services so that we can further improve based on the needs of our customers and the wider marketplace.
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Conclusion
Well… it has been a busy year and reading back, it is going to be another one. I am a firm believer in the concept of continuous improvement and that through small and consistent change, we can make large impacts with the multiplier of time. Our unwavering mission is to help all of our customers businesses to be more efficient and in-turn help them to achieve their aims, which is something I ask all of my team to keep in mind when taking decisions or when working with our customers. Last year, they demonstrated that through adverse events, personal achievement and the numbers discussed in this article.
Because of this, I believe we have the right team and ethos to achieve all of the goals for the coming financial year and maybe even more. But what I am really excited about is returning to this article next year and sharing our experience and learnings. We no doubt will miss some of our targets, the market will change and unforeseen circumstances will be thrown our way on the journey, but we will continue to steer the ship toward its ultimate mission of our customers productivity frontier.
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About the Author |
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Chris Payne is the Director of Strategic Alliances and Technical at Pro2col, with decades of experience in software management and Managed File Transfer solutions. Chris is not your traditional techie with server racks under the stairs. He advocates for a healthy work/life balance, saving his love for technology for work and developing his passion for craft beer at home. Chris is a qualified brewer and has on occasion whipped out the brewing equipment. He’ll be up for a Friday pint. |
