An Update from the Customer Experience Team

September is a busy time for the team as we support the return of our customers in education back to a fresh new academic year. This Summer flew past even quicker than usual as we also upgraded our Authentication Service and have been busy preparing for a major update to both our password and identity services. As well as the updates to our technology, here is what else has been going on in the Customer Experience team...

Goodbye & Farewell to Team India
At the end of this month we close our offices in India which brings the full Support team to the UK only. We're very grateful for the great contributions made by our Indian colleagues over the past year, but ultimately we feel the best choice for our team and our customers is bringing support fully in-house into the UK. We've spent a lot of time simplifying processes and systems over the past year, and we're finding having a smaller team of really well organised expert people is vastly more productive than having greater numbers of people working from distance. The improvements we've made to our platform in the past 9 months have also significantly reduced our overall support ticket volume - we're down from nearly 200 known issues to just 19 today, and most of these remaining issues will be resolved in the next 3-4 weeks. 

Support and Development teams in one office! 
With the full development and support team both located in the same UK office we are able to have daily stand ups each morning as one full team. With better collaboration we are resolving issues and innovating our platform at a much faster rate. It also makes for much better office banter!

Hello to our new Infrastructure Engineer, Lewis, and Service Delivery Manager, Lisa!
Lewis joined our Infrastructure team in August and is loving his new role of making sure the IAM Cloud platform is stable, optimised and performant. Lewis is a wizard of cloud automation, and his first priority has been improving our release scripts and ensuring our software release procedure is faster and more efficient and reliable. It's going well - our entire authentication service can now be deployed in a single click! Welcome Lewis (and well done already)!

LewisandLisa.jpg

I am personally very excited by the arrival of Lisa who has already made a huge impact to our onboarding process and the delivery of our larger customer projects. Lisa heads up our Service Delivery department with focus on onboarding our customers to our platform and major project deliveries including our File & Email Migration service. Our customers are also loving her arrival where timelines and deadlines are readily available based on a thorough analysis and risk assessment. Welcome Lisa!

Service Delivery Manager assigned to all Onboardings.
Getting our customers onto our full service as quickly and smoothly as possible is a major priority for us, and we're making good progress on improving the onboarding process, organisation, communications and resourcing. No rock is being left unturned to find ways we can make things smarter and simpler. 

Total overhaul to application onboarding - new applications daily
Onboarding federated applications has long been a challenge for us, and has required a significant amount of internal engineering resources for us to accomplish. This has had knock-on impacts on the speed in which we're able to achieve this for our customers. With the release of our latest authentication service, we've now reached a point where about 80% of the process is automated, with the final steps being close to full application onboarding automation. This will allow us to get a wide range of our customer's apps onboarded swiftly, easily and with minimal user impact. In the past week we've onboarded Samanage, Clickview, Blissbook, Simplicity, School Dude and Polystat and are adding more every day. Did you know if you are on our Base Plan you can have up to 5 applications federated with us at no extra cost. If you want to add another application just contact our support team and they will advise on the simple steps needed to get this configured up. 

Breaking eggs to make omelettes 
Due to the magnitude of the changes we've had to undertake to transform us away from our old aging infrastructure to a lightning fast highly resilient platform there have unfortunately been a few issues along the way. With our final major upgrade coming within the next 4-6 weeks, and anticipated to have a significantly lower impact than the changes to our authentication system and API, we're nearly out of the other side of our biggest ever upgrade project. The final upgrade will address some of the synch issues we've been encountering, especially in provisioning to Office 365. 

We're excited by the position we've worked hard to reach - with a great team and fantastic new technology. We're looking forward to moving into a new era for IAM Cloud.

Thank you to all our loyal customers and as always we really welcome your direct feedback so please do not hesitate to get in touch at victoria.hamblin@iamcloud.com or call me direct on +44 118 324 1017.

Topics: customer experience, company update

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