How choosing Oosha led to a significant improvement in Boodle Hatfield’s outsourced IT support

The IT team has had a particularly busy time of it working out all the many remote working needs of 2020. However, Val Fox, IT director at Boodle Hatfield, had been looking to replace one element of her strategy – the firm’s outsourced helpdesk service – as long ago as autumn 2019.

“The users just weren’t using it,” she says – a pretty clear impetus to make a change if ever there was one. “Our people didn’t feel that they were getting a good service, and they were calling up my internal team with their queries instead.” It was the opposite of what an outsourced service is designed to provide – adding internal work rather than relieving it.

Productive and proactive
After a chance encounter at a conference (a physical one, indeed), Fox settled on the managed IT service promise of Oosha – which has now been operating the helpdesk since May 2020. A first-line support team handles any user queries over the phone or by email; they can be escalated to the second line if necessary, while a third line is available for any infrastructure problems.

The ‘new normal’ of preparing for multiple video meetings and getting to grips with the nuances of collaboration tools have naturally produced plenty of calls in the first category. But an approachable team with timely service is also important generally, when there just “isn’t the person sitting nearby to ask in that moment,” says Fox. Oosha is entrusted with playing its part to support individual productivity and morale at what may be an exceptionally challenging time for people personally as well as professionally.

She was looking for three main things from that partner in selection, she says – experience of the sector, evidence of value for money, and a close relationship. Oosha ticked all three boxes, but it’s the final factor that has particularly impressed her.

“It’s a real joint endeavour – as well as fixing problems, Oosha is proactive at highlighting opportunities for user training, improvement and trends it sees in the industry that we could turn to our advantage,” she says. For example, it has been able to flag challenges other firms have experienced with upgrading or moving between different products, which has enabled the IT team to be more on the front foot for users when change occurs. As well as the managed IT arrangement, Oosha also offers law firms infrastructure-as-a-service and cloud virtual desktop services, either via its own data centre network or Microsoft Azure.

Fox was also impressed that they proactively recommended having an Oosha team member onsite at the firm’s London office to floor-walk and get more familiar with the world of the firm quickly – “something we haven’t seen before,” she says. In the event, Covid-19 prevented that physical journey from happening, of course, but the effort to get to know the users they were supporting continued remotely, nevertheless. “They quickly built up the necessary credibility with people who were working from home, and today we regularly receive positive feedback from people.”

Team time
Oosha is also well integrated with Boodle Hatfield’s internal IT team – each Friday there’s a review of that week’s user queries to capture learnings for continuous improvement, and Oosha takes part in one daily ‘standup’ meeting each week to stay abreast of progress on the most significant business projects.

Of course, through dealing with fewer day-to-day obstacles, Fox’s team can now focus that much more of their energy on delivering such strategic projects efficiently and effectively. Unsurprisingly, many things in their project book at the moment are looking to an increasingly agile-working landscape in future – new laptops are on the cards, as is a Microsoft Exchange Online migration, and a desk-booking app ready to see people safely back into office space when the time is right.

In the meantime, Boodle Hatfield can be confident it has the support of a trusted partner to keep some of the fundamental factors in people’s productivity on track each day.

This content was taken from Briefing November 2020: Alert to change. Read the issue here.