Case Studies – Collaboration

CHALLENGE
Overnight this traditional brick and mortar, 500 person, private equity firm, found they could no longer work from their offices. Coming from an environment with the “latest and greatest” technology, the transition to work from home became daunting for individuals who had to transition to a new setting that lacked many of the office equipment and collaborative spaces they had been so accustomed to.

They needed to enable their users with remote conferencing, connectivity, and security solutions quickly. While most individuals had a laptop, there were minimal employees that had a fully functional home setup or had never worked in a full remote capacity before. Working with Aqueduct, they were able to quickly extend the corporate resources and enable for remote workers. In combination with some cloud services, the users were up and running within 48 hours. However, enabling the users with functionality was only the first step.

Users quickly needed to not only work from home, but also adjust to working “with” home. The simultaneous home-schooling, sharing of devices with family members, and unfamiliarity with some of the devices and operating systems made it difficult to maintain a high level of productivity.

IT had been well equipped to support the in-office standardized support model as well as providing “white-glove” desk side end user support. However, with the multitude of devices, lack of installed support agents, and inability to physically touch the end user devices they quickly found their resolution time balloon and end users becoming increasingly frustrated with the support.

SOLUTION

After Aqueduct helped extend the customers state of the art communication and conferencing capabilities for all home users and leveraged a variety of VPN and security technologies for connectivity, the process of optimizing the experience for the users began.

For many, these users’ home kits were purchased and provided technologies that ranged from secure network gateways, video and IP phones, monitors, printers, and laptops. To preserve capital, many of these solutions were acquired through a monthly payment model for each user. In other cases, a stipend was provided to users to purchase their own supported BYOD devices.

Through Aqueduct’s remote help desk services, customers were able to quickly get their equipment up and running, and ask general support questions across the variety of their equipment. In addition, due to the nature of Aqueduct supporting heterogeneous environments across our customer base, we already possessed the tools, skill sets, and knowledge base across the variety of technologies that the end user was now supporting.

Aqueduct was able to provide users with general direction on how to create virtual backgrounds for video conferencing, troubleshoot connectivity or network performance issues, ensuring printing and scanning functionality, and creating guest accounts with limited privileges when children needed to use office equipment for their remote learning. Within a week, the customer saw ticket resolution times drop by over 75% and end user experience returning to pre-COVID levels through their per ticket satisfaction surveys.