The past 3 decades of so have seen technology play an increasingly critical role in how businesses operate and provide goods and services to their customers. Today, the digitalisation trend is accelerating, with the latest workplace productivity solutions, communication platforms and connectivity/telephony technologies offering unprecedented productivity gains to organisations willing to embrace change.
We appreciate that bringing changes to any business can often seem a daunting prospect, and this is especially true in high-pressure, compliance-laden sectors such as care. Since 2016, Bells IT support has helped care providers across the southeast become more effective and efficient with dependable, proactive IT support and strategic, tailored tech solutions.
Leveraging technology for maximum benefit requires a willing and capable IT partner who’s able to mould leading-edge solutions to your business’s processes, constraints and quirks. Sadly, in our experience, many providers are not up to this task, with many using a templated approach that’s blind to the industry-specific pressures and unique circumstances their clients experience. Some even fail in their basic duties as an IT provider, leaving their clients struggling with poorly maintained, outage-prone technology that hampers productivity.
As a care provider, your IT performs a vital supporting role. It ensures your staff resources are deployed as efficiently as possible and should support your compliance objectives by ensuring patient records are handled in a manner compliant with both CQC requirements and UK-GDPR. We understand that resilient technology is vital to your service delivery, with 24/7 uptime crucial to ensuring your team are able to deliver the highest standard of patient care. To help you determine whether your care practice would be better off with Bells, we’ve assembled a list of the top 5 ways IT providers let their clients down and what we do differently.
Recurring issues and unresponsive support
According to recent research, a single minute of downtime costs firms an average of $5600 dollars, with consequences ranging from immediate revenue loss to lingering reputational damage. Despite this, some providers fail to maintain their clients’ infrastructure adequately, and others (although less common nowadays) don’t offer proactive remote maintenance as part of their service. When an issue does occur, it’s important to have access to round-the-clock support, backed by competitive response time guarantees and a commitment to resolving disruption as quickly as possible. Again, many providers fail in this regard, often using unrealistic response-time figures to attract new customers without the capacity or will to honour such claims.
The Bells IT approach
Our managed service offering covers all bases, from cloud services (public and private) and on-premise servers to telephony, business broadband and much more. Proactive by default, our support plans prioritise the preventative actions that preclude system downtime, including rigorous patch management and continuous network health monitoring. At the beginning of the partnership we’ll survey your digital infrastructure and offer a list of improvement actions that are realistically costed and work in harmony with your business processes. We also stock a wide range of hardware, giving us the ability to resolve some of the most common issues in the fastest possible timescale.
If issues do arise, our friendly helpdesk team will be on hand to provide the support you need 24/7, with competitive average response and resolution times of 30 minutes and 105 minutes respectively.
Inflexible support that isn’t cost effective
Businesses often cite ‘poor value for money’ as a motivating factor for switching IT provider. Many providers fail to demonstrate their ability to add value to a business, often presenting their offering in a rigid, uncompromising way that’s out-of-sync with the budgetary constraints their clients face.
The Bells IT approach
We understand that businesses have varying IT needs, and that this necessitates a flexible approach to IT support provision. Whether your internal IT team needs short-term ancillary support for a particular project, or you’d like to benefit from full IT infrastructure management and support, we can tailor an agreement that suits your business and its bottom line. We help our customers plan ahead, with IT spending forecasts that balance short-term expenses with longer-term rewards, with a priority given to ROI in every solution we propose.
Businesses rarely stand still, and we know how important it is- particularly in the care sector – to have the technology ready and waiting to support expansion. While we’ll take great care in getting to know your business as it stands today, we’ll also seek to understand your growth ambitions so that the most cost-efficient tech solutions and new devices can be prepared ahead of upscaling to ensure your patients enjoy uninterrupted service delivery.
Ultimately, we aim to transform technology from a costly burden to a revenue-boosting asset, with reliable solutions that enhance workplace productivity and support that leaves you free to focus on running your business.
Little to no understanding of industry-specific pressures
Many providers offer a menu of products and services with no ability or willingness to accommodate the industry specific-challenges faced by their clients. In sectors with a heavy regulatory burden (such as healthcare) it’s important that your provider is at cognizant of the pressures you’re under so that they’re able to adapt and configure solutions to suit your compliance needs.
The Bells IT approach
Our client base extends to both the public and private sector and across multiple industries. This has given us an understanding of the regulatory landscapes and proprietary software common to each sector, emphasizing that the one-size-fits-all approach rarely works in IT.
We understand that as a care provider your business is bound by the requirements of the Care Quality Commission, the legislative provisions of the Health and Social care act 2008, as we as some of UK-GDPR’s most stringent provisions relating to the handling of ‘special category data.’ This is a more onerous compliance landscape than that faced by many business, and requires a considered approach that satisfies all regulatory bodies simultaneously.
In addition to challenging compliance pressures, we also know how important it is that carers have reliable remote access to patient records, and that your office-based team enjoy dependable, supported IT infrastructure and telephony, with special consideration given to care management software such as StaffPlan and CarePlanner.
We can deploy a range of security devices across your network to help you safeguard data and satisfy compliance requirements. For remote devices, our MDM (mobile device management) solution gives us the ability to configure laptops, tablets and mobile phones for maximum security and limit such devices to work-only functionality. More generally, we can deploy firewall and anti-virus protections network-wide to limit your exposure to cyber threats in adherence with UK-GDPR’s ‘security principle.’
The CQC recommends the existence of ‘robust arrangements for the availability, integrity and confidentiality of patient identifiable data.’ With additional measures such as email encryption, document access controls and multi-factor authentication, we can help you demonstrate to potential clients that your business takes data management seriously and has sound mechanisms in place to ensure patient confidentiality.
Cold and unhelpful communication
One of the key objectives of any good IT provider is to make their clients feel reassured and supported. Unfortunately, some struggle to connect with their clients beyond the contractual basics, and when they do they often use excessive technical jargon.
The Bells IT approach
We believe that friendly and open dialogue is vital to any trust-based business relationship, and we’ll strive to get to know your team on first-name terms, whether you have 6 or 60 employees.
IT is our passion, but we know that yours is likely providing outstanding patient care. That’s why we’ll always frame technology in terms of what it can offer your business rather than bamboozle with technical specs and jargon, and we’ll make sure your team know how to get the most out of the tech at their disposal.
With an often-packed daily schedule, we understand the time pressures care providers are subject to, with these leaving very little time for IT admin tasks. Let us manage software licenses, correspond with vendors, manage system updates and maintain your hardware so that you can focus on what really matters: providing great patient care and running your business. Should you decide to make the switch to Bells IT support we’ll even fully coordinate the handover process, including correspondence with your existing provider in order to ensure a smooth transition.
Bells IT Support – Strategy-driven IT for businesses across London and the South East
Based in Dartford, Kent, Bells IT support delivers a full-suite of IT services to businesses across London and South East. Our small, friendly and dedicated team holds expertise in a broad range of disciplines, encompassing everything from the cloud solutions and business connectivity to cybersecurity, business telephony, audio-visual and much more. Situated at the heart of our offering, our SLA-backed managed IT services feature remote monitoring, comprehensive data backup and 24/7 support as standard for ultimate peace of mind. Get in touch today to find out how our strategy-driven IT support could help your business flourish.