There are few things worse than a company that keeps making empty marketing claims just to sell their product.
If you tell me your app is going to save me time, give me actual numbers. Historical data. Even just a ballpark figure, at least.
Usually, though, all the marketing speak basically boils down to “Use our app and it might save you a few seconds. Or maybe an hour. We’re not really sure ourselves.”
That’s why we don’t just say, “WORKetc makes you more efficient”. We dive deep into the hows and the whys.
We back it up with hard data from actual WORKetc users—users like Atcom Technology director Malissa Fonte, who recently shared with us some insight into how WORKetc has helped them better serve more customers, faster.
Helping 5 Times the Clients, Faster
According to Malissa, WORKetc has had a strong and clear impact on how Atcom, a Perth-based IT firm, provides technical support nowadays.
See, before WORKetc, Atcom worked almost exclusively out of Outlook, which housed all customer data, jobs, and tasks.
Back then, it regularly took over an hour for a single support ticket to go through the entire process—and that’s not even counting the actual tech work that needs to be done.
In the six years since they started using WORKetc, however, Atcom’s support teams have been able to cut down the process to a mere 20 minutes. They’re now helping five times more clients at a fraction of the time it used to take.
This is how the company’s old support process went:
- Step 1. Client sends email to shared support mailbox.
- Step 2. Outlook flags and categories are used to show which technicians are assigned to which tickets and at which stage the ticket is currently.
- Step 3. Technicians search Outlook for client name. Ongoing issues related to the new email are sometimes missed altogether.
- Step 4. Client info is located in internal wiki or Outlook contacts. Other technicians who have worked on the ticket before sometimes have to be located and asked for additional information.
- Step 5. Write up Outlook calendar event. Tickets are marked either “TBC” or “Completed” for billing purposes.
With WORKetc, the company’s support process became much more simple:
- Step 1. Client sends an email to support email address. Email automatically entered in WORKetc support module. Some tickets are auto-updated or auto-assigned to specific technicians.
- Step 2. Technicians and admin check support ticket activity history and assign jobs.
- Step 3. Timesheets logged.
Complete Support History At A Glance
Malissa notes that they still have the same number of support technicians now as they had six years ago, but WORKetc has made them all able to greatly pick up the pace.
Each support technician can now serve five times as many customers, with each client helped at only a third of the time it used to take.
Since WORKetc’s support module automatically updates support cases as new emails come in, Atcom’s support team no longer had to scour through their shared Outlook inbox for any issues that may be related to the new email.
WORKetc’s activity history feature also kept the entire team updated regarding any given issue’s status, from the very first email sent to the last thing their techs did for the client. They didn’t need to find out who was working on which issues and bug them for updates.
Those same three support technicians are now working more efficiently, meaning they’re able to take on and take care of more support issues on a day-to-day basis.
Instead of going through only four to eight tickets in a typical eight-hour workday, Atcom’s support team is now able to handle over 20 tickets a day.
They’re saving almost 2,000 extra man-hours per year, and that’s without even adding a single extra person to the team.
“We are now looking after over 700 endpoints”, Malissa adds, “compared to 100 endpoints six years ago.”
More Invoices, Efficiently Handled
Support’s not the only department benefiting from WORKetc either. See, Atcom has experienced great growth in the past few years, and the company is now handling seven times the number of clients it used to.
Their billing department is now creating and sending out more invoices, but guess what? Atcom’s admin and billing agent is able to handle all of the company’s billing and invoice jobs in about the same amount of time it took back when the company was seven times smaller.
According to Malissa, the increase in billing efficiency comes from being able to cut down the time they used to spend on following up, checking, and reissuing invoices by using WORKetc’s built-in invoice module.
She also notes that in the past, many jobs were not even invoiced correctly at all. Now, they’re no longer losing money on incorrect invoices and billable items that accidentally fall through the cracks.
With the time and money Atcom Technology has saved using WORKetc, it’ll be no surprise if they grow seven times larger again in the next six years.
COMMENTS
It’s like I was saying on the previous post: the more things you can automate and store together, the more money you’ll make. It doesn’t make sense to waste time for subpar results when doing it through worketc gets you quicker and better results. Good on Atcom for leveraging the technology with their needs.
Wow, I didn’t realize how dragged out the “old way” is. This automation is very impressive.I also feel the chart in the”More Invoices, Efficiently Handled” section really breaks down what a one stop shop Work[etc] can be. I always keep at least 3 filters in my Support Ticket area. One with a list of all the support tickets ever, for previous solution searching. One for all the “Active” support tickets, excluding the ones passed up to tier 4, “Development Team”. Lastly, just the “Active” ones assigned to me.
I can definitely relate to this article when it comes to support tickets. Before WORK[etc] we were using an in-house ticketing system that wasn’t connecting the person opening the support ticket to the client. Which meant at the end of the year we had to manually go through all of our support tickets so that we could quantify the amount of support given to a client, literally line by line on a spreadsheet, and matching it up to the correct client. As you can imagine, once we switched to WORK[etc] the efficiency of our online support has skyrocketed! We still need to integrate the billing, though, which is somethign we plan to tackle before 2017 year end.
We have experienced similar results at tekRESCUE. After reading this article, I want to look into ways to save even more time by taking out excess steps. It seems like worketc literally has endless possibilities. Thank you
WorkEtc is a true time saver in many respects. I believe the biggest blessing is doing things ONCE, doing them right, and documenting how they were done, to avoid re-inventing the wheel when similar issues arise. From entering client info ONCE, to creating a Knowledge Base article ONCE, to creating a Project Template ONCE, and creating new projects from the template, WorkEtc allows us to strive for “best-in-class” solutions for clients based on a thoughtful approach and vast experience. In fact, many support tasks are avoided altogether because we have a keen sense of what may go wrong, and we build and support to avoid issues in the first place – plus we’re careful to address potential issues when training our clients.