“This year is THE year of growth for CTRL-S and we’ve got a really good team and a great system behind us”
CTRL-S needed a service management solution to support them as they embarked on an ambitious growth strategy. Technical Director, Matthew Jones, shares how the Revo 4me team is helping them on this journey.
CTRL-S started out as a branch of accountancy firm, Hallidays, offering IT managed services to help the firm’s clients to get the best possible performance (and minimal hassle) from their technology infrastructure. Over the years, the IT spinout grew organically and in 2019, the decision was taken to make their tech branch a standalone limited company. The business continued to grow steadily and sustainably and in 2022 it was given a new more distinct brand and identity. CTRL-S was born, and this marked the beginning of a more ambitious growth strategy for the business.
“This year [2023] is the year of growth,” Matt says. “We’re targeting quite aggressive growth and to help us achieve this, we’ve now got a really good team and some great systems behind us. We’ve spent probably the past 18 months to two years becoming highly systemised – introducing service management has been an important part of this.”
Supporting growth
Prior to 4me, CTRL-S was using an email-based ticket management system. Although this was sufficient in their earlier years, it couldn’t adapt and scale to meet the needs of the business’ fast-expanding client-base.
“We could see it would become difficult to track and monitor queries and we couldn’t categorise and prioritise requests as consistently as we wanted,” explains Matt. “Although you could star something as urgent, what was considered urgent was very open to interpretation by individual team members.”
Introducing 4me has allowed CTRL-S to develop a more methodical approach to how they deal with queries into their service desk, so requests are prioritised and dealt with in a consistent and standardised way.
“Everyone follows the process and because there’s a system telling them how to do it, it isn’t left to individual interpretation,” Matt says. “No matter who is tasked with the ticket, you get the same result.”
Prioritising partnership
After identifying service management was what their service desk needed, they embarked on a procurement process to identify the best provider for the job. Working in the IT industry themselves, they were careful to look not only for the best technical specification but also a provider with a partnership ethos and commitment to high quality service.
“IT services is an unregulated industry – there are terrible providers out there, so you have to be very careful when you’re selecting who to work with,” Matt warns. “At CTRL-S, we partner with all our customers – we become an extension of their team. And this is what I felt we would also get – and are getting – from Revo. I felt we were important to them.”
This partnership approach meant that when it came to launching 4me, CTRL-S had the confidence and support to debut the system with a completely new customer.
“We could potentially have had 2,000 people phoning us on launch day if it didn’t go to plan – fortunately this didn’t transpire because everything worked, but potentially it could have happened,” Matt remembers. “But Nick rang us and said I’m just going to work from your office on that day. He sat in one of the meeting rooms, and he was there for us in case anything went wrong and we needed to configure or change something. If that’s not partnership, I don’t know what is.”
Practising proactivity
This collaborative approach continues now through the managed service CTRL-S receive from Revo. For example, having Revo’s Paul on hand has allowed them to perfect the onboarding process for new clients.
“Jamie, our service desk manager, now onboards new clients himself but when we were first doing it, he’d have Paul from Revo helping him,” Matt explains. “This gave Jamie the confidence to do more and now he’s done so many with Paul, he can do them on his own.”
With CTRL-S clients successfully transferred to 4me and email now eradicated from their support desk processes, the team are now using the reporting and metadata generated by 4me to offer a more proactive element to their service to their clients.
“We want to help people before they know they need it,” Matt explains. “With the reports and all the metadata for requests we get from 4me, we can now go to a client and say we can see this is becoming a problem for you, so let’s go and see if we can do anything about it. With our previous system there was never any way we could have done this – it was reactive and 4me has enable to become more proactive.”
Forward looking
This is just the beginning for the Revo and CTRL-S partnership. There is a roadmap of integrations and other developments that CTRL-S are now keen to implement. But they can do this safe in the knowledge that they have the Revo team there to support them.
“Everything Revo said they would do, they have,” Matt concludes. “It’s been an excellent start to what could be a really long-term partnership.”
For more information about our work with CTRL-S, read the full success story. And if you’re interested in finding out how Revo 4me could transform your approach to service management, we’d love to talk you through our approach.
