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What is White Glove IT Service?

Basically, White Glove Service means, providing or giving meticulous care or attention. But have you heard of White Glove IT Service? Do you know that as a business owner, your organisation can highly benefit from this? In this video, let me talk you through the meaning of White Glove IT and how can it boost the productivity of your business. 

Transcript

If you’re a business owner or an executive in charge of managing technology in your business, you may have heard of the term White Glove service. And in this video, I’m going to share with you what that actually means, and why it’s important to you as a business owner to consider why this might be useful to help you save time and get more efficiency in onboarding your team and take advantage of tech tools to make your scaling process simpler. 

 

My name is Peter Moriarty, and we help business owners with their tech tools. And we make sure that business owners have the right technology strategy in place so they can grow and scale and build more successful teams and businesses. Today, we’re going to talk about white glove service and what this actually is. And effectively, this is a term that’s come out of the vendor space in the IT world. But I’m going to deconstruct a little bit about what this actually means. Now, this has to do with the onboarding of your team and onboarding of staff members when you get them set up, and the technology tools and the technology devices that are involved when you actually go onboard and get a new person set up inside the business. 

 

Now, a white glove service means that when you actually set up a new staff member, or a new team member, that their computer is already set up for them, think of it like a concierge service, you go to a fancy hotel, and they’re going to take that bag for you, they’re gonna put it up in the room, they’re gonna have your favorite champagne, there, they’re going to have you towels nice and warm and ready to go. That’s the kind of thing or the experience that we want to create for an employee when they get started on their first day. Now, everyone knows the nightmare situation of the opposite, which is your onboarding new staff member and their email isn’t ready by the time they’ve got to get work started. And they go to sit down at their desk. And maybe the computer hasn’t been fully provisioned, or it takes half a day for it to set up the apps and the programs and all those kinds of things. Not only is that lost productivity, but it’s also going to give the team members a pretty poor impression of them starting with your company. And of course, the experience of that is really important because you want them to be productive. But also you want to, I would say in my opinion, honor that employee by ensuring that when they start, they actually have all the tools in place. So they don’t add to their stress and anxiety of starting a new role.

 

And so a white glove technology service means that when an employee comes in the asset, or the resource is all ready to rock and roll so they can start productive work. Now, they’re probably not going to be jumping straight into productive work on their first day. But if they can, at a minimum, attend meetings, and emails, and if they’re working from home, connect with their team on the various communication tools that you’re going to be using within the business. These are the kinds of things that you want to have ready to go. So they’re not waiting around to try and get started with work. While you’re fumbling getting the technology, right, there’s three things that are core components of a white glove service, and actually making sure that team members are ready to rock and roll, I’m going to take you through what those look like. Number one is ensuring that there’s the correct access levels for each staff member. If they’re on the accounting team, then they probably want to have access to the finance folders and the right calendars for the finance team. If they’re on the customer service team, then they’re going to need to have access to cold scripts and anything else that they need to work with their team members there. Obviously, if they’re an executive, they’re going to be going through an onboarding process for executives, which is probably going to include meeting the team, but also being able to see across the organization and see all of the resources across an organization. 

 

And so ensuring that your correct access levels are set up for each team member is the foundation of that and we have other videos, I’ll link that down below on how you can set up group based permissions inside Google workspace. So your team can get access to the right resources. But the day that staff member starts, you have failed, if they have to ask you, Hey, can I have access to that document? Or can I have access to the shared drive or can I have access to that folder, we want to make sure that the day they are starting, they have the correct access to everything that they need. Secondly, white glove means shipping the device directly to the staff member. Now in the old days, where we had people working from home or working from different offices, what we would do is we would ship all the devices to a central location, and then that location would get them ready or provision them. And then we would send them out to the individual staff member no matter what office or department they were in. 

 

In the organization nowadays and the current global pandemic, most team members are currently working at home or at least in geographically distributed locations. And so rather than a technology company, if you’ve got an external consultancy, or an IT team, if this has been handled internally, shipping that to the staff member only after it’s been set up, these can actually be configured on the behalf of the vendor or by an IT consultant and then sent straight to the staff member so that you the business owner, or your internal IT team don’t need to bother with the onboarding and provisioning of the technology device. 

 

Now, you might think, well, it’s not their job, isn’t it his job to provision devices? Well, what we’re seeing is a shift in most businesses in the mid market and the corporate enterprise space is that many of their technology teams and especially the technology leaders want to spend more time on strategic tasks. And what that means is that they want to be working on the high level projects, they’re going to bring more value to the organization, then rolling out somebody’s laptop and spinning it up and installing, you know, whatever apps need to be installed on that machine.

 

Now, working with a technology consultancy externally can make this process easy because what that means is there’s actually less burden on that technology team internally inside your business. And you can focus more on those higher value tasks, having a device run up externally and then shipped directly to a staff member so they can open the lid and get to work is the best case scenario for productive workers and keeping your team focused on what they need to be. Thirdly, I’d like to talk about asset tracking and protection. Now, when you have a white glove service, you’re actually managing each of the serial numbers and managing each of the asset tags of the devices. When you have a predetermined way of onboarding each of your devices, which is consistent, then those devices will all have the same amount of security protocols and the same amount of protection required for those devices. 

 

One of the things that is critically important is actually making sure that each device has the correct protections with pass codes and access for each person that’s accessing that device. Now, if you happen to be using something like a Chromebook, then the device access is actually locked down to your Google workspace account. And a lot of those technology policies can actually be deployed from the central workspace admin panel, which is nice and handy. But if you don’t have that setup, right now, then you need to actually manage the devices individually. So all of this comes together in what we call the white glove service, which is making sure that people have the right access from day one, devices sent straight to a staff member so they don’t have to wait around for them to be rolled up. And thirdly, they can switch it on and get started straight away with access to the right resources. And from there, your team members are able to get productive from when they get started. 

 

Now if you’re interested in configuring or exploring a white glove policy, what that might look like internally inside your business, or if you’d like support from us, then click the link below and you can jump onto an audit our business services 1000s of businesses all over the world, helping with technology policy, everything to do with Google workspace, and the small and medium sized business ecosystem. 

 

If you’re an organization that needs help with Google workspace, whether you’re an education, a corporate enterprise, or a small and medium sized business, we can help move you in the right direction.

What is White Glove IT Service

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