Over the past few months we have conducted an operational review, focusing on utilising staff strengths and streamlining processes. Our end goal is to improve the services we offer to clients.
A healthy and strong business can be split into 3 key areas: philosophy, processes and people. All of these key areas need to be well oiled cogs to improve performance.
Processes
Support & Feature Requests
We have built up a portfolio of hundreds of clients here at Indulge. Most of these clients contact us during the year in some shape or form, everything from a small website upgrade to a completely new feature. Sometimes we can be dealing with up to hundreds of new requests per week from many different clients.
Working with Zendesk, we have come up with a job ticking solution, making it easier to manage client requests and improve our response time. Clients are now advised to email [email protected] with any website support or feature requests they have. One of our team will qualify the request, respond back and resolve it. We plan to roll this new system out over the next couple of months and will be in touch with clients to explain the process in more detail.
Scheduling
When you start running a business it's easy to fall into the habit of creating a spreadsheet to cover everything under the sun that you need to keep track of. As a business, we are moving away from spreadsheets and seeking out or designing web apps that manage large amounts of data. Project scheduling is one area where we have been using a gantt chart style spreadsheet. After version 4 of this spreadsheet, we decided that a custom project scheduling solution would be a better solution, and we have found one.
Thanks to the guys at Harvest Forecast we are now up and running with their online project scheduler. It's saving us hours of time that would have previously been spent moving blocks around in our old pipeline spreadsheet. Project scheduling is more accurate and we have a clearer view on how busy each member of the team is during the week.
We will also continue to use our own time management system called Springg for tracking time logged on tasks. Springg has been designed and developed here at Indulge.
People
Directors
There will now be a more defined split of responsibilities between the two directors in Guernsey, producing a clearer single point of contact for staff and clients.
I will be handing over my account management duties to Pat. This role consists of being the escalation point for high severity account issues and account strategy. Pat will also continue in his role to provide high level technical support and be our chief sales person.
I'm continuing to be our lead user experience and interface designer, but now alongside managing all projects. I also track the performance of our business and maintain our quality management system. This includes regular reviews to improve our operational efficiency and strategic positioning.
Development Team
Luke, our longest serving full-time developer, has been promoted to the position of Head of Development. This role includes greater control over the scheduling and management of development resource. Luke has been continually driving forward efficiencies in our business and leads our weekly Code Club at Amherst school.
We would also like to welcome a new web developer to the team, Alastair Howard. Working remotely from France, Alastair has been operating on a freelance basis for many months but is now officially part of the Indulge team.
Please see our about page for more information on the Indulge team: indulge.digital/about
Philosophy
From the day we started this business, quality has always been at the heart of what we do. Our mission remains the same: to provide best-in-class client experience, good value, a high standard of work and continual improvement in the workplace.
Our business will be operating under the ISO 9001:2015 standard from January 2017. We already have an excellent quality management system conforming to ISO 9001:2008, so the changes are minimal. ISO 9001:2015 is built around risk based thinking, mitigating and preventing any business risks.
We will continue to evolve the operational side of our business on a regular basis, providing clients with the best possible service.
