The biggest challenge our business faced during the pandemic put simply was the unknown. Like many businesses, not knowing the impact of COVID-19 on forecasted sales figures left us feeling unequipped and blind in steering the UK IT ship forward. Second-guessing our customer’s reactions to lockdowns, whilst reviewing the dynamic of our customer base and the impact COVID-19 was likely to have on them, was all thrown into the mix. Ultimately these really were unprecedented times and to exit COVID-19 in a similar business position as we went into it, was what we forecasted as ‘real success’.

Our strategy for supporting our customers was simple and clear – ‘Assist our customers today, and they’ll remember us tomorrow’. All teams across the business gave that extra effort, taking ownership in delivering world-class support and provisioning new services at record speeds to accommodate the immediate transition to home-working.

We saw an exponential increase in businesses throwing away their on-prem phone systems and replacing them with home-working hosted solutions. As a business, we made a commercial decision to remove our up-front charges to accommodate this transition.

Now was not a time to capitalise, it was a time to show commitment back to our customers. A commitment that included:

• Reducing our IT Support contracts by 50% for up to 9 months
• Providing home working laptop clients free of charge for 4 months
• Extending payment terms
• Allowing services to be cancelled mid-contract without penalty

“Our operations team surpassed expectations and our customers reflected this through their feedback – a job well done.”

In October 2020 we acquired Essex-based IT business Seabro IT, to complement our existing team. Their additional skillset furthered our IT Support reach, whilst opening a new data-centre-hosted virtualisation product offering to our existing customers. Having a secondary office in Essex promotes the quicker deployment of engineering for our North-Western clients who have offices in the south also, thus ensuring our commitment to deliver world-class service in-line with our customer-focused company values. We made the conscious effort not to promote this in Q4 of 2020, as many businesses were struggling with on-going COVID-19 restrictions and a sensitive approach was deemed necessary.

In 2021 our intentions are to make a further acquisition within the IT and Cybersecurity marketspace. With a significant increase of businesses working from home, cybersecurity is paramount to their successful bounce-back from COVID-19. Avoiding cyber-attacks at an affordable cost is a service we offer and commit to continually invest in, to keep our customers better protected.

As we move out of the latest lockdown and businesses have undergone the commercial pain of transitioning to cloud-based applications including Microsoft Teams, Virtual Server Hosting and Hosted Telephony, what is perhaps more important now than ever is the security of your cloud-based applications. Ensuring that the hard-work of steering your business through COVID-19 is protected not just today, but every day.