Customer Solution Case Study
/ IT Solutions Company Streamlines Operations, Saves 60 Hours Annually with Office 2010
Overview
Country or Region:United Kingdom
Industry:Professional services
Customer Profile
Peak Support is an IT solutions company providing outsourced technical support, project management, and advisory services. The company primarily serves small businesses in the East Midlands area.
Business Situation
Peak Support needed a suite that would allow employees to spend less time managing emails, collaborate more efficiently, and create animated presentations more easily.
Solution
By deploying Microsoft Office Professional 2010, Peak Support was able to manage everyday operations more efficiently, resulting in clearer communications with customers and a higher level of responsiveness.
Benefits
- More efficient collaboration
- 60 hours saved annually
- Better email organisation
- 20 seconds saved per email
- Better client responsiveness
Guy Gregory, Technical Specialist, Peak Support
Since 1991, Microsoft Certified Partner Peak Support has provided outsourced technical support, project management, and expert advisory services to small businesses. Located in East Midlands, United Kingdom, the company primarily serves Microsoft-based clients within a 14-mile radius of its office.
With a small staff of five, Peak Support relies on efficient processes and clear communications to provide clients with responsive service. To sustain its solid reputation, the company is always seeking ways to optimise processes, improve collaboration, and achieve faster resolution times.After deploying Microsoft Office Professional 2010, Peak Support saw a considerable improvement in its capabilities to share information, delegate tasks, and communicate both internally and externally. This resulted in higher levels of customer satisfaction and an overall boost in productivity.
Situation
Although Peak Support is a small business, it consistently tackled large-scale projects that required the staff to work together to accomplish milestones. Employees spent a great deal of time emailing documents back and forth, which hampered their efficiency and caused version control issues. Another challenge the company faced was securing sensitive documents during the life span of a project.
Peak Support’s employees spent an inordinate amount of time managing their email inboxes, sifting through their inbox and sent folders to track down various components of an email thread. Scheduling was also inefficient; technicians had no easy way of setting up meetings directly from an email, requiring them to close the email, open up a new meeting invitation, and paste in the information.
Solution
To overcome its challenges, Peak Support deployed Microsoft Office Professional 2010. The new suite offers dozens of features designed to promote easier sharing of information and more efficient task management, as well as advanced scheduling and email capabilities.
By allowing users to more efficiently manage their emails, work together on large projects, and create more impactful presentations, Office Professional 2010 has allowed Peak Support to get more done in less time and with fewer resources. This has increased the company’s service capabilities considerably.
“The new Office Professional 2010 features have maximised our time to interact with our customers,” says Guy Gregory, Technical Specialist for Peak Support.
Benefits
Since deploying Microsoft Office Professional 2010, Peak Support employees have experienced more effective collaboration and an increase in productivity.
Seamless Collaboration
With Office Professional 2010, the days of emailing different versions of documents are gone. Now, users can easily collaborate with vendors, colleagues, and supervisors in the same easily accessible interface, eliminating the need for multiple approval/revision cycles, and reducing the chances of version issues.
The new Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010has also made it easier to set up security rules to determine who can access sensitive documents.
“Without effective collaboration, each of us would have different parts of the jigsaw puzzle,” says Gregory. “With the new SharePoint Workspace 2010, we have the full picture.”
SharePoint Workspace 2010 allows Peak Support users to collaborate both internally and with other associates, such as a Microsoft support provider in Birmingham, with ease and efficiency—and without excessive travel time. "If we didn't have SharePoint Workspace 2010, we would probably have to have a monthly meeting, which would mean a 50-mile drive each way," says Gregory. "So that's 100 miles a month I'm saving on that specific task alone."
SharePoint Workspace 2010 has been extremely helpful to Peak Support clients that serve international customers and members. Now that they have the capability to post documents to their shared workspaces, users can have live access as multiple changes are made to the same file. Clients have been impressed by how quickly a workspace can be set up, and how easy it is to use.
Creating high-impact presentations is also easier with 2010. In Microsoft Excel 2010, the new Sparklines feature has allowed Peak Support employees to create more effective presentations using small, high-impact graphics embedded within the spreadsheet. “It’s a small feature, but it has a big impact in visual demonstrations,” notes Gregory.
In the 2010 version of Microsoft PowerPoint, the new Animation Painter function streamlines the process of including animation in presentations, eliminating the previous manual process. “Our staff and users are much more likely to use animation features in PowerPoint now, because they get more done in less time,” says Gregory.
Improved Email Management
With Microsoft Outlook 2010, inbox management is significantly easier. The Conversation View allows employees to quickly locate messages within their original thread, without sifting through multiple messages in the inbox and sent folders. Gregory estimates a savings of 20 seconds per email, resulting in an extra 15 minutes of productivity each day—60 hours per year.
The new capability to schedule meetings directly from an email has also increased efficiency, as has the capability to easily share and publish calendars. Peak Support’s employees have also appreciated the cosmetic improvements made to the Outlook interface.
Small Details, Big Impact
Although collaboration and email management have been the major improvements noted by Peak Support employees, there are a myriad of smaller features that have not gone unnoticed.
In Microsoft Word 2010, the new Print Preview and Paste Preview functions are praised as more intuitive. Employees also appreciate the enhanced image editing tools in Word 2010, eliminating the need to use an additional application when creating presentations. In Microsoft Publisher 2010, the ability to save documents as PDF files is a user-friendly timesaver.
Overall, Gregory and his team have been very impressed with the productivity boost they’ve seen since implementing Office Professional 2010. “We’re more responsive in our actions and communications, and we have more focused conversations,” Gregory says. For Peak Support, that’s a recipe for increased customer satisfaction and better internal efficiency.
Microsoft Office 2010
Microsoft Office 2010 gives your people powerful, timesaving tools to do their best work from more places. With new capabilities and insightful updates to Excel, PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook, Office 2010 offers the complete package—with familiar, intuitive tools. Now you can express ideas, solve problems, connect with people, and create amazing results—in the office, at home, or on the go.
For more information about Microsoft Office, go to: