Behind the scenes of reaching our peak at Q2Q
Over the past year here at Q2Q, we’ve been doing a lot of work on our own internal processes – things that our customers won’t be aware of – but they will benefit from.
There are two main angles we’ve been focusing on – the technical and the behaviors – and here’s a flavour of some of the things we’ve been up to on the behavioral side of things.
We’ve been busy developing a ‘building block’ model that breaks down all the elements which form part of delivering exceptional service to our customers. The building blocks, as we call them, can be used in any work-related environment, and have really drawn the team’s attention to how they work – as opposed to simply what tasks they need to complete.
We hold frequent meetings, in which we regularly rate ourselves – often everyone is too tough on themselves! – and we look for ways to improve our score by the time of our next sit-down.
So, the foundation of the building blocks is the narrative. At our meetings, we review our narrative to ensure that we are asking the right questions – using proactive language – for example, “what can I contribute or take responsibility for?” or “what could be improved?” and “how could I make this more efficient?” In between meetings, we also encourage calling each other out if someone says something that doesn’t fit with this continued-improvement mindset.
Another essential building block is rituals. These centre around how robust our processes and attention to detail are – as well as our success-rate of getting things right first time – and being proactive as opposed to reactive. In a service-led business, particularly one that comprises lots of problem solving like IT support, it’s easy to get bogged-down with the day-to day-tasks and move robotically from one task to the next. Therefore, we ensure there is the opportunity to challenge how we work, and always step back to look at the bigger picture.
The environment we work in is the next building block. At Q2Q, we pride ourselves on being a collaborative, plain-speaking, open and honest team, ensuring we provide clarity for each other and for our users. And this is something our customers frequently compliment us on.
Productivity is the next one – and our key focus at present. The team all challenge their peers regularly not just on what they are doing, but whether they are working in the most productive way. In our meetings, we then share ideas on how to work smarter and more efficiently – before putting these notions to the test and measuring our performance.
Customer focus has always been key at Q2Q, and as the team and our customer-base has grown over the past 18 months, we now hold a fortnightly after-hours meeting to review all our customers. This allows us to retain focus – keeping everyone aware of current issues and not just the ones that they have been assigned tickets on! As a result, this not only helps us to improve everyone’s knowledge, but also transfers key learnings across different accounts.
Lastly – and possibly most importantly for a technology-based business – we’ve significantly ramped up our focus on education over the last year. Subsequently, this has seen senior members of the team running monthly after-hours masterclasses, picking relevant subjects to train the rest of the technical team on.
We’re continuously adding to our documented knowledge-base, with everyone in the team writing brief articles on anything new they have dealt with, so the knowledge is there at their fingertips should the issue occur again.
Overall, our primary focus is teamwork. And, whilst a customer may see just one of the technical team working on their issue, there will often be many consultations in the background – sharing best practice ideas – and this is a key illustration of the in-depth collaboration and continual upskilling that goes on daily behind the scenes at Q2Q.
If you’d like to chat to our team in more detail about any of the points above, feel free to get in touch!