How a three-state claims business went from seventeen tickets a month to three

Seven people. Three states. And a provider that had quietly grown past them.

Nothing was broken, exactly. Work just arrived in fragments, invoices arrived in fragments, and somewhere along the way, asking a question about their own systems had started to feel like an imposition.

The firm that once knew them by name had grown from a small team into a fairly large one. That is not really a failing, it is mostly what growth does to a service, and smaller accounts tend to feel it first. You go from being a client to being a number in a queue, and nobody writes to tell you it has happened.

As their operations manager put it, IT is not their field of expertise. Which is rather the point of hiring someone. It should not come with a side of feeling slow.

They were also midway through moving their phone system across, with numbers still to port. The sort of job nobody notices when it goes well, and remembers for years when it does not.

We took the lot, rather than a convenient slice of it. Managed IT, Microsoft 365, the laptops, the network, the phones. One agreement, one invoice, one name to call.

While we were onboarding, we also set an Essential Eight baseline at Maturity Level 0.5. Nobody asked us to. It just seemed better to know where the security position actually sat on day one, rather than discover it later at a considerably less convenient moment.

Day to day, support runs on two tracks. There is the visible one, where someone logs a ticket or, more often, simply messages our service delivery manager directly, which we are entirely happy with. And there is the quiet one, where threat, malware and dark web monitoring sits behind the environment, catching things on the way in.

Most of the value tends to live in the second track, which is also the one nobody ever sees.

Seventeen tickets in the first month. Three by the fourth. An 82% drop, and roughly the shape a good onboarding should have: everything is new in month one, then the inherited problems clear and the questions stop needing to be asked.

Across the same quarter, monitoring blocked ten inbound threats on the way in. As far as anyone at the business is aware, none of them ever happened.

Though the line we keep coming back to is not a number at all.

At the quarterly review we asked the directors, directly, what had been the most annoying part of their first three months with us.

The answer was that it had been fine.

Which is not the most quotable sentence ever handed to a marketing team. It is also, for a business where IT is meant to stay out of the way, about as close to a compliment as the category allows.