2016 Year in Review: Managed Services

amanda-sharp
Amanda Sharp – Managed Services Manager at risual

 

risual  Managed Services team worked on many significant projects throughout the past year and have continued to support the critical systems of some major organisations.

Restructuring the team

We introduced some major changes within the team this year, but I believe it has proved to be a key factor behind Managed Services’ continued success. We restructured the team into separate proactive and reactive divisions. The impact of this meant that customers could build better relationships within their respective Microsoft divisions. Customers building deeper relationships with their select group of engineers then enables the engineers to perform much better and resolve problems quicker – due to a better understanding of the system. The change-up has also received brilliant feedback from customers, so it was good to have assurances that it has worked out for the best.

 

Accreditations and growth

This year, the team received its ISO20000 accreditations, which we passed last year for the first time with no non-conformities. The ISO accreditation is an internationally recognised standard for service delivery and we successfully achieved it again at the start of December. This helps to give customers greater peace of mind over the motoring and improvements to their systems.

On top of this, the team completed a scan for the government-backed Cyber Essentials scheme, with members of the team also completing Microsoft exams to keep them up-to-date with the latest technologies and how best to deal with any issues.

The team has continued to grow, having had eight apprentices graduate from last year’s scheme, with 12 more starting during the summer. We’re fully committed to providing young people the opportunity to get some hands-on experience, working on projects for some of the biggest organisations. We constantly get feedback praising the work that our engineers do, which sometimes goes through the night and on bank holidays.

The early year restructure in 2016 saw a marked increase in the quality of the service we deliver. It also allowed us to develop a strong foundation for continued growth in the future moving forwards.

 

The future

With every new customer we bring onboard, we grow in terms of knowledge and that has led to us supporting a huge variety of workloads and systems. Our service desk has grown from being part of the support team to a dedicated, professional contact centre and is now an offering within itself. I believe our commitment to quality customer service will see us growing this offering further throughout the year.

With the expansion of risual solutions, we will also be supporting mobile applications and offering a new kind of support. This is sure to throw up new challenges for our team to overcome, and will once again push us to achieve new heights in terms of technical capabilities. I believe risual Managed Services is fast becoming a market leader in Managed Service agreements, our work agreements have led to excellent levels of customer satisfaction, as detailed in our case study with Bond Dickinson. Many organisations are seeing that large, multi-year contracts are restrictive and costly. With that in mind, I believe we can look forward to welcoming even more customers in 2017 and maintaining the excellent level of service we are renowned for.

 

Read more about Managed Services here

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