Mimecast assists EOH with further education for customer support

Context

First listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1998, EOH is one of South Africa’s most established IT solutions providers.

Providing business and technology solutions to all major industry verticals, EOH provides consulting and outsourcing services as enablers of productivity within the thousands of businesses it touches on a daily basis.

With over 5500 permanent staff and an extensive network of subsidiaries, EOH has certainly earned its place as one of Africa’s leading technology focussed entities.

As a recognised Mimecast Systems Integrator (SI) and longstanding supporter of the company’s integrated security solution, EOH is tasked with fielding employee and customer requests relating to the service. This requires a detailed internal understanding of the Mimecast platform and its associated benefits.

“Deep relationships into the Mimecast organisation made escalations or urgent matters simple to deal with which translated into a great customer experience and reduced turn around on issues and implementations.”

Dominic Oettl - Divisional Director, EOH

Challenge

In order to service such a significant internal and external Mimecast user base, the EOH sales and technical teams require a close appreciation for the platform and the demands they will be required to address.

Without a comprehensive education programme, it would prove difficult for both Mimecast and EOH to maintain the high levels of customer satisfaction that the organisation is widely regarded for. With this in mind, the team responsible for the provisioning and maintenance of Mimecast services within EOH identified a need for on-going training on the Mimecast platform.

“EOH has a long history with Mimecast, having implemented and supported the platform since inception. EOH subscribe to a ‘Right First Time’ principle, this resonates in every action we take in conducting our daily duties. To ensure this, it was essential that our internal Mimecast support team aligned closely to the Mimecast support and training structures. As a result, current and new staff attended the technology updates and platform training regularly,” comments EOH Divisional Director, Dominic Oettl.

Solution

In 2008 Mimecast partnered with EOH to introduce the organisation’s technical, account management and sales teams to a number of training programmes aimed at sharpening employee understanding of the email security platform and related services.

These sessions were executed on several levels, including Mimecast instructor led training, group education and internal gatherings. While the EOH technical team was engaging in service management, Mimecast Power Tools and Stationery Branding training, the account management and sales force teams were encouraged to take part in enablement sessions and basic Mimecast product education.

Embracing a long term approach to internal skills development, EOH has continued to work closely with Mimecast on its training initiatives.

Benefits

According to Oettl, this relationship has had spin offs on many levels.

“Given the intrinsic knowledge of the security platform on both a sales and technical level it became a standard which majority of our managed services customers subscribe to. New customer subscriptions were often the result of an engineer recognising the need in dealing with a service outage rather than the typical sales approach”.

“Deep relationships into the Mimecast organisation made escalations or urgent matters simple to deal with which translated into a great customer experience and reduced turn around on issues and implementations. Having a close relationship and mutual trust also opened up the door for EOH to participate in new feature development and testing. This again re-enforced the relationship and ensured that we were at the forefront of product innovation which could then be translated into business benefit to our customers”.

Mimecast’s strong focus on continued support and education has also benefitted the technical service team significantly, believes Deepesh Maga – EOH Technical Team Leader for Managed Services.

“The Mimecast training we experienced has been very valuable and certainly made it easier to effectively support our customers and staff. Following a thorough induction and training process we certainly feel equipped to handle any request that may come our way.”