What the heck is the Connecting Point Way…………No, it’s not a side street. It’s the unique way that we provide holistic support to our clients. The Connecting Point Way has been evolving over a two year period, but has now been in place for several quarters. Our overarching goal is to provide our clients best in class support to enhance their IT environments and protect their IT investments.
Here are the pieces that make up The Connecting Point Way:
- Dedicated Net Admin for all managed clients – the Net Admin is the technical liaison for our clients. Their job is to proactively evaluate and improve the client IT environment. One of the major tools the Net Admin has in their bag of tricks is our myITprocess software. This software is comprised of over 200 best practice questions that guide the Net Admin in evaluating and aligning client environments to industry best practices while also helping them identify any areas of improvement for our clients. This tool continues to improve over time as we enhance it.
- Business Consultant for all managed clients – the Business Consultant works hand in hand with the Net Admin to evaluate and consult with our managed clients. The Business Consultant will work with our clients to jointly create a written technology roadmap. Our motto is that “our clients should never spend any money on technology that is not planned for in advance.” The Business Consultant is also the person that works regularly with our clients to insure all their needs are met from a product, project and support standpoint.
- Remote Operations Center (ROC – also known as our Help Desk) – all support issues start here. When a client network issue is detected from our management tools or a user has an issue that needs to be resolved a ticket is created for our ROC. Our ROC engineers are assigned specific tickets to work on from our customer service representative. Our statistics say that on average we get tickets scheduled and actually start working on an issue within 90 minutes of receiving the request. Our average resolution time for issues is currently 41 minutes. We have driven down these times, and continually work to be more and more responsive to client needs.
- Escalation Engineer in the ROC – about 5%-10% of all tickets need additional attention or a higher level of expertise to resolve the issue. That’s where our Escalation Engineer comes in. That engineer will tackle the escalated issue and either resolve the issue remotely or occasionally they will need to go to the client site. This extra layer of support has allowed the vast majority of trouble tickets to be resolved quickly, and the more troublesome tickets are then handled by the proper resource.
- Best in Class Network Management Tools – every managed service provider has management tools, but Connecting Point has not only invested heavily in excellent tools, but with our twelve years of experience we have learned how to apply those tools effectively. The benefit to our clients is accurate analysis and reporting of network activity and issues. Lots of heavy lifting work is done remotely with our management tools. They keep our clients environments monitored, patched, secure from the outside world, secure from malware and backed up properly.
- Process, Process, Process – managing client networks requires a disciplined, process-driven approach. Connecting Point has been in the managed service business for twelve years. We have learned many, many lessons over that period of time. We have incorporated those lessons learned into our processes. In every area of our managed service suite we have highly developed and tested processes. The benefit to our clients is that we will do things properly the first time and we will resolve issues more quickly. Additionally, onboarding, documentation and overall proactive management are enhanced by the processes we put in place.
Without EVERY one of these well developed areas, your managed service offering will be lacking. We continually strive to improve and enhance The Connecting Point Way to provide our clients the best managed service suite possible.
