I’ve been hyping it for a couple months. And here it is. Yes, we did a new website for it, but the real project is BestMacs Network Overseer.
BNO (which by the way, we pronounce interchangeably “Bee-Know” or “Bee-Ehn-Oh”) isn’t just a new service offering, it is a complete redesign of BestMacs’ business model that started to take shape in 2008. You’ve seen important glimpses of it in 2009 and 2010 as I tweaked BestMacs operations to get us ready for this. And when I said 2010 – our tenth year of business – was going to take it to a new level, I meant it.
That’s right, BNO is a culmination of over two years of planning and development. But more important than that is that it comes from lessons I learned while working with you, BestMacs clients. Let me share a few of those lessons:
Log files are useless unless you look at them.
Sometime a couple years ago, one of my favorite BestMacs clients suffered a pretty severe server crash. We did what we always did; we rescheduled things to get out there and fix it. But it ruined their whole week because they had to make up for a whole day of lost productivity, it inconvenienced other clients who had to be rescheduled to accommodate the change, and the worst part? It could have been avoided. The log files had been showing disk failures for two weeks before it finally gave up. Had we seen it even a day earlier, we would have put a fix in play and they would have had zero downtime.
Vendors can’t play the blame game with us.
Just recently we had a client who got a new printer and everything was fine, except they couldn’t print from their page layout program. Well, the copier vendor said, “Hey, everything else prints except that program, it must be your Mac.” So we got the call. After some serious troubleshooting by everyone on your BestMacs team, we determined without a doubt that the printer was missing a key hardware component and that was causing the issue. The “blame game” started and our client was in the middle. Finally, the client and I convinced the vendor to bring out the hardware as a test, even though they were sure it wouldn’t matter. And it fixed the problem. Now imagine how much faster that could have been solved if we had been in on it from the get go, directly interfacing with the vendor on our clients’ behalf.
The very service model BestMacs offered prevented people from using our services.
This was a huge realization that took me almost 3 years to come to grips with and fully understand it. Something breaks on your Mac. You have to quickly decide what you’re going to do about it. Fix it yourself? Costs you your time that you could spend doing more enjoyable or more productive things (you know, like your job.) Call BestMacs? Costs you money. (As much as I enjoy this, I gotta pay the bills.) Obviously, you know which one I prefer – I want you to call us because I know we can take care of your Mac problems faster, better, and address the bigger problems that cause the little issues. But many times, our clients won’t call because they don’t feel like the problem is worth $129 or $90 or $75 – even when you have prepaid for BestMacs service. Maybe it’s just not in the budget. Imagine then if every problem, every day, cost you nothing beyond what you had budgeted and already paid.
And finally, the most important lesson:
Proactive service is faster, better, and less expensive than reactive repair.
This is the heart of the change we make today. For the first ten years of BestMacs, we were completely reactive. You only called us when something broke. We only saw you when something broke. Or when you were getting something new to install. But reactive repair is expensive both in dollar cost and in time and productivity loss. And thanks to some regular, consistent proactive work with a handful of BestMacs clients over the past few years, I saw that we could be doing so much better for all of our clients – it was just a matter of how to scale it. I’ve been working that scaling problem since December 2007, and with a couple of big bumps in the road, I started shedding the parts that didn’t fit in 2009, and this year began rearranging our customer service, internal operations, and tracking to match this paradigm shift.
And here we are.
I’m so excited to finally be able to share with you what I’ve been working on all this time. If you’re a BestMacs client, you’ve been telling me how much better our service has been this year. Thank you for sticking with us all this time. But, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet; I can’t wait to share BNO with you in person. We are scheduling visits just as fast as my schedule will allow.
And if you’re new to working with BestMacs, I promise you that you have never seen anything like this from a Mac-based IT services company.
Please call us to set up a free 12-point business and technology evaluation to get your customized BNO plan. It’s going to make your Mac computing experience so much better.
Posted by brian on Aug 15, 2010 in Blog | Comments Off
