12-27-13 | Blog Post
When a company decides to use a third party hosting provider instead of hosting in-house, it’s a big commitment, and a big change. A company should be comfortable trusting their provider, and confident that their data and applications are safe and secure. I interviewed Noah Wolff, Online Tech’s Project Manager, to learn more about his role in fostering the incredibly important client-provider relationship.
In a nutshell, Noah says of his job, “I’m in charge of deployments. It’s my job to make sure clients are deployed quickly, accurately, and with a good customer experience.” I suppose that sounds simple enough, but there’s much to do on the backend to fulfill that promise.
Once an order has been signed, Noah is notified, and he has an internal kickoff meeting. The kickoff meeting is between Noah, the sales person, and a sales engineer. This is to go through the order with a fine tooth comb, checking for any errors, questions, or problems.
After Noah gives the thumbs-up, the sales rep schedules a meeting with Noah and the client. Noah carefully reviews the entire order again, this time to make sure everyone’s on the same page: “It’s to set expectations with the client, let people meet each other at an early stage, understand who’s doing what, figure out firewall rules, set due dates, and answer any questions the client asks. Some companies have lots of questions when they entrust their IT infrastructure with us, and this is where they can get them all answered.” Throughout this meeting or call, Noah takes prolific notes. A welcome email sent after the conversation details what they spoke about, provides the client a written copy of the expectations on both sides. When everyone is clear on who’s doing what, the order proceeds to our deployment team to build it out to specifications.
Noah explained that there are two things he cares most about when working with clients:
“I’m focused on two things. The first is communication. I want them to perceive that it isn’t hard to get a hold of us. I’m not hiding behind anything. There’s a real-live human who knows who they are, what their system is like, and will be there the whole time as their advocate. The second is setting expectations. It’s important to do this because if a client thinks they’re getting one thing and they’re set to get another, it’s not going to be an exceptional experience. I explain what’s included in the scope of their offering, so it’s clear how it works with Online Tech. These two elements make the biggest impact on providing a great client experience.”
Noah has a knack for making difficult work seem effortless, and it’s all due to his client driven nature. “Early in my career, I made an effort to speak at a level that’s understandable to people on the phone. Looking back, it was great preparation for what I do now. I work with a range of knowledge levels. Our team is very technical. Half of our clients are technical, but sometimes clients don’t know much about having their hands inside a server. My method is to err on the side of a person not knowing, until proven otherwise to make sure I’m not talking over their heads. I’m trying to give a smooth, easy deployment process.”
On the day the order is ready, Noah calls the client one more time to walk them through logging onto their servers for the first time. The reason is purely for a good experience. If the client has any trouble logging on, he’s on hand to resolve issues immediately. It’s also the formal hand off to our attentive support staff. “During deployment phase, they become very familiar with me, but after this phase ends, they transition to our support staff after deployment. I set that expectation, send them instructions on the new process, and show them how to open a ticket if the opportunity presents itself. It really ushers them into that new area and process.”
Noah’s focus and dedication to our clients encapsulates many of our company’s core values. He received Online Tech’s Exceptional Experiences award earlier this year for fostering a client focused environment and a ‘win-win’ mentality, and continues to uphold our promise of ‘exceptional people delivering exceptional experiences’.
