The launch of our new service: Unlimited IT Support, a global initiative to disrupt the traditional IT Support Industry which is a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, remote IT support service that can quickly assist you with your IT needs anytime of day wherever you are in the world. Our two main KPI’s for this product are; 4 hour response time and quick (less than 30mins) replies to all jobs (we call them tickets) but our main point of difference is we manage all systems (hardware and software) under this service. Firstly this was aimed at our local Australian community (so we could test the market with this new service and get traction) before rolling it out to overseas. I had this service in the back of mind for a long time but because I was unable to put any attention towards it I could never focus on getting it off the ground. The market research I had completed was that no one in the western world had actually given this model a go, properly. I had found a few companies in the western world that added this type of model into their existing company as another product but it wasn’t exactly the same and also wasn’t what we were trying to achieve. On this basis, we knew we had to test the market before spending a lot of money on it. It just so happened to be, and at the same time CROFTi Offshoring was closing down, Dan Norris was running his 7 Day Startup campaign. This 7DS campaign is aimed at people like myself who have an idea and ponder on them for way too long without actually starting. So being able to switch off from the world and put your full focus on the Unlimited IT Support model over a 7 day period was a key turning point for us. More on 7 Day Startup here.
This meant launching the product with no systems in place as we wanted to keep the cost down, with much disgrace from Amy (the systems girl!). We originally listed 3 fixed price points for this model. $79, $99 and $199. What we found out is the $199 plan ended being more of a competitor with Managed Services, (which is what we wanted to move away from) and the $79 plan was more of a break-even amount for us, so we didn’t push these two plans and focused on selling the $99ex per month plan. How it works, is depending on how many staff members you need us to support in your business, depends on the total price per month but being a month to month it’s very flexible, so if staff members come and go, we adjust to suit.
So for example if you have 1 staff member it’s just $99ex per month for Unlimited IT Support or if you have 10 staff members its $990ex per month. This made it so much easier for the customer to manage compared with existing Managed Service Models. As we charge per staff member and not per device it’s a lot more cost-effective for the company as the world has changed and most staff have more than 1 device these days. We also ended up offering the UIT service to not-for-profit organizations for the $79ex price point, which was us giving back to the community.
As mentioned before, we, of course, set our goals high when we released UIT so we put down 1000 users being subscribed to our Unlimited IT Support service by EOFY 2016 (June 30th, 2017). Was this achievable, we thought so, but it doesn’t look like it will. Why? It hasn’t been as easy as we first thought and there has been a lot of learning in the last 12 months to get this product to where it is today. Firstly my time has gone a lot into CROFTi Consulting, read below, and we had to spend a lot of time on systemizing and automating Unlimited IT Support. Currently, we have just over 140 users subscribed and last year we completed 1400 hours of IT Support work from 1192 jobs with an average response time of 3 hours and 12minutes managing 50+ different applications. More on the Unlimited IT Support story here…
