If ever there was a time to find out who your true business partners are, then this time of unprecedented crisis that we are all facing, is the one. We always talk about the ‘RedDrum Family’ of clients, which is often met with scepticism as some sort of marketing ploy. It isn’t. If you are in the RedDrum family, then you will know that our engineers have worked night and day, since the crisis started, to get clients that wanted to be able to work from home, set up and working. This has been a massive task and continues to be so, from a support perspective. It has involved moving from a position of supporting 1,500 individuals, housed in 25 business locations, to facilitating around one 1,000 individuals, working from separate premises.
The magnitude of this task cannot be underestimated. Many home locations are not ideal for home working. They may have poor connectivity, staff may require specialist software programs on servers located in work premises, have no printing facility or their Internet service Provider may not allow the configuration of secure, VPN connections. Despite all of these factors, almost all of our clients have been able to continue functioning from home premises. It is an ongoing process. As staff learn and adapt to different processes, they invariably require further support and help once they are up and running. Often, there is no-one else in their organisation to help them.
An event such as this crisis illustrates the different way that RedDrum work with their clients. Even though RedDrum staff have worked long and hard, sometimes through to the early hours of the morning, no charges have been levied. From a contractual perspective, all of the work that has been undertaken is chargeable as the support contracts relate to support provided to business premises. However, we are true partners. At times, we all have to suffer together. On the vary rare occasions that we have made mistakes, our clients have acted in the same way towards us.
It isn’t easy to maintain long commercial relationships, in the world of Information Technology, as personnel and technologies change on a regular basis. Many of our clients have been in ‘the RedDrum Family’ for more than 10 years and some as long as 20! Like all families, we sometimes have problems, but the reality is that there is a great relationship of interdependence. The Corona virus has perhaps been an extreme example of this.
