What are the technology needs of your business? Doug McIlvaine and Katie Charmicky of Netcom joined Jim Kelley and Ron Taylor on the Champions DFW Radio Show and Podcast to discuss their impact on the technology needs of businesses throughout the Dallas / Fort Worth area.
Take a look at this excerpt of their conversation. Then, learn more about identifying your technology needs in the free download podcast.
Jim Kelley: Let’s talk about your client process, your intro to your clients and your process. How do you engage clients? And kind of walk us through the process from when you make contact with a client or somebody contacts you regarding your services.
Katie Charmicky: Sure. After I meet with someone, what I’ll do is I’ll set up an appointment and I’ll go out and I’ll meet with the business. And what I’ll do is technology assessment. I’ll sit down, I’ll go through their needs. We’ll talk about telecom surveillance, managed IT, any services, technology-based, that they’ll need. And then pretty much what I’ll do is I’ll kind of, like I said, do an analysis. And then the next step will be bringing out one of my engineers to go through and do more of the detailed work, and so forth. And they’ll go through that. And, you know, we’ll set up a system, what’s going to work for them. And then after that, I’ll do the maintenance with my clients.
Jim Kelley: Which is critical in our business. I mean, we go through similar process. We interview clients to understand their requirement because it’s hard for me to locate the right property or space if I don’t have all those deal points put together. And we talk about growth, I mean, I’ve had a lot of clients that go into the space. In a year, they’re out of growth, or they’re out of room. So now I’ve got to try to work them out of that lease and take them to another spot. So that the whole frontend interview process is very critical to us in the commercial brokerage side, as well. And then managing that client throughout the process is also something that we do. Doug, talk to us about that process with your clients, and maybe about your team and about your staff, and how you deploy your services.
Doug McIlvane: Sure. So we have reps like Katie, they’ll identify an opportunity with a customer where they have a need for the solution. And as she said, you know, we’ll go out and she’ll bring an engineer with her. And so that engineer will, you know, determine…will go through those steps with the customer, you know, “How do your employees conduct their day? What technologies can we provide?” To not only make their jobs more efficient, but also, you know, as an employer, you want to have reporting and you want to have an idea of what they’re doing, and so that you can measure one employee against the other. So you can say, “Okay. Well, this one is successful because of this reporting here,” and so you need to kind of, you know, step up your game a little bit to match that. And that allows them to help manage the employees better.
And so once we engineer that solution, then we go through the sales process. Once they contract us to do the work, then we bring in a project manager. And so that’s the core team for the customer. So the customer then can contact any member of that team, the technology specialist, the engineer, or the project manager throughout the installation process to…because it is an involved process, especially if they’re getting all the technologies. It’s a very complex situation.
And then once the solution is implemented, is a very in-depth training process that we go through that is…over the years we found that there’s only so much they could absorb on the first go-around, so we’ll do an initial training, and then do kind of a Q&A training, say, a week later we kind of get them up to speed on some of the things that maybe they’re not utilizing. And then, two weeks later, we’ll do a more in-depth final training that will allow them to utilize more in-depth features that they may not have used in the first couple of weeks.
Meet Jim Kelley and our team, here.
Who are our vendor partners at Champions DFW? Find out here.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
