From Crisis to Confidence: The Strength of ClerksWell's Service Management Team

At ClerksWell, we take great pride in our exceptional Service Management Team (SMT). This dedicated team is the cornerstone of our agency's operations, ensuring that we meet and exceed our clients' expectations. The SMT is responsible for delivering top-notch technical support for a wide range of client needs, including applications, websites, and various other systems. By fulfilling our clients' service level agreements, we guarantee reliable and efficient support, helping our clients achieve their goals seamlessly.

In addition to providing support for applications developed by our own project teams, ClerksWell has earned a reputation as a “rescue” agency, with expertise in onboarding and taking over the support of applications and websites built outside of our agency. We’ve assisted many organisations in crisis: whether they’re struggling with sluggish support providers, clogged delivery pipelines, or stretched internal IT teams.

We excel at quickly onboarding clients who are facing challenges. Our proven onboarding methodology ensures that we move swiftly without compromising on the details. We understand that "the devil is in the detail," so we meticulously address each client's unique needs and circumstances. This approach allows us to provide tailored support efficiently, ensuring our clients can get back on track with confidence.

What makes great service management team?

Perhaps you’re searching for what makes a great support team or you’re simply curious to know what’s makes our support team tick? Whatever your purpose, let’s explore what makes a great service management team and what we offer.

Technical Expertise

At ClerksWell, our development team brings decades of experience and deep expertise across a wide range of technologies. We really know our stuff. We specialise in website-specific packages like React and ASP.NET, as well as custom SharePoint development, Power Automate, and many more. Our Service Management Team (SMT) embodies this extensive experience, with each member focusing on specific skill areas.

As both a website development and Microsoft services agency, the SMT provides support in five key categories:

• Support and Maintenance of Website Code: Primarily for CMS platforms such as Umbraco, Sitecore, and Optimizely. This includes all 3rd party tools for Search, CRO platforms, Accessibility plug ins, Cookie Management solutions etc. 
• Monitoring and Maintenance of Hosting Platforms: Including Umbraco Cloud, Azure, and AWS.
• Support and Maintenance of Complex Integrations and API's.
• Integration with Ecommerce Systems: Such as KEA, Pimberly, and Ucommerce, payment providers etc. 
• Support and Maintenance of Internal Systems: Within the Microsoft stack, including SharePoint intranets and Power Platform solutions.
• Support and Maintenance of Bespoke .NET Applications.

This structured approach ensures that we deliver high-quality support and maintenance services tailored to our clients' specific needs.

Our SMT technical team is headed up by Rafael de Souza, our SMT Lead. Raf brings a wealth of expertise and many years of experience with all the technologies we support. This means that whenever a client has an issue, they can count on having a team that is managed by senior-level support to address it promptly and effectively.

Clear Communication

Great support starts with clear, effective communication: both internally in the team and externally with our clients. At ClerksWell generally, and especially in the SMT, we understand that nurturing strong relationships and ensuring clients are best supported requires clear, regular communication and a drive to get at the heart of a problem. We use a top of the line customer service platform, Zendesk, to track, manage, and respond to requests via tickets.

For communicating with our clients, the two key areas that we focus on at ClerksWell are response times and the quality of responses. No one wants to be left in the dark when facing a bug or issue and the SMT strives to ensure that clients are provided fast and regular updates. We regularly review response times to client requests to ensure that we’re meeting and exceeding SLA times and to ensure that we’re providing the best service possible.

Alongside this, getting to the crux of the problem and resolving an issue in a timely manner requires quality, detailed responses. We understand that our clients are busy and therefore, to get issues resolved quickly and effectively, we aim to resolve a ticket in as few interactions as possible. In order to achieve this, we provide as much detail as necessary in our responses and work to clarify any ambiguity that we may have about a problem. In practice this can often mean stepping away from the tickets and jumping on a call to run through the issue directly. We find this gets to the problem faster, leading to faster resolution times and happier clients.

Willingness to take anything on

Our work in the Service Management Team (SMT) extends beyond supporting clients whose websites we've built. We understand that sometimes digital projects can be a tangled mess of legacy systems, multiple partners, or different people in charge. It can seem like it's too hard to hand over to a new agency, or clients might think no one will ever get their head around their systems. Over the years, we've assisted many organisations that urgently required technical support for their applications at short notice. As a reliable pair of hands with many years of experience managing websites, ClerksWell is perfectly positioned to support a prospective client in crisis. We thrive on taking on these challenges and untangling the complexities to provide seamless support and solutions.

How does it work?

Organisations have historically come to us for a range of reasons: the relationship with their current support agency isn’t working out, their IT team is inundated with requests and needs additional support, or perhaps there’s a lack of internal expertise and knowledge to resolve problems. At ClerksWell, we take on the support of organsations’ websites via a process of onboarding and handing over to the SMT.

Onboarding

To ensure that we know exactly how to best support each client that comes to us, we onboard the organisation via a series of workshops. The size and complexity of a client’s website will dictate how many workshops are required, but typically this is a 2-3 week exercise led by a dedicated project team.

These workshops give our technical team a detailed understanding of the website or application as it stands, covering areas such as hosting, system architecture, codebases, and more. But we don't stop there. We also take the time to get to know the team behind the project. We delve into the unique peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of the systems in place, ensuring we understand every nuance.

Moreover, we recognise that each member of the client team has their own personal pain points and challenges. These workshops provide an invaluable opportunity for us to identify these issues and understand the specific frustrations and obstacles that different members of the team face. By doing so, we can tailor our support to address these concerns directly, ensuring a smoother and more effective collaboration.

In essence, our onboarding process is not just about understanding the technical aspects of a project, but also about building strong relationships with the people involved. This holistic approach allows us to provide the best possible support and ensures that we are fully equipped to help our clients succeed.

Handover to SMT

Once onboarding is complete, the project team will hand over support of the application to the SMT. This process ensures that the SMT gains a thorough understanding of the solution while still being supported by the onboarding project team. This collaborative handover guarantees that nothing is missed and that all details are meticulously covered. Once everything is handed over, the SMT will provide SLA support for the website and application moving forward, ensuring continuous and reliable service.