What does lifetime support mean?

We understand that launching a new business can be both daunting and exciting as you take a step into the unknown. Every business has an element of inherent risk, as you substitute the monthly salary for the opportunity to have uncapped earnings.

However, when operating a business you need to be prepared for the good and bad times. Ask any successful business owner and you’ll hear about how they triumphed in the face of adversity. Just like a good Rocky movie, “life's not about how hard of a hit you can give, it's about how many you can take, and still keep moving forward.”

Being a business owner requires you to develop a unique set of skills. Juggling deadlines, clients, staff, family to name just a few, you need to be flexible in how you tackle your working day.

But essentially, there comes a point in every business owner's life where they need help and support. Whether it is a technical question from a client or strategising on the best way to move forward, every business needs a sounding board.

With that being said, the focus of today's blog is to highlight just what lifetime support means and why it’s so crucial to the development of every single partner that joins our Network, regardless of where they are based.


Is lifetime support, really for life?
The short answer is absolutely when it comes to our Network. We recognise that every partner within our Network is a unique individual, with their own skills and experiences. It’s actually one of the most rewarding parts of our businesses, understanding the motivations for each partner and helping them realise their ambitions.

Therefore, our lifetime support is just that, for life. For as long as you’re a partner of our Network, you can reach out to our team about every aspect of your Digital Agency. Whether it is technology, marketing, sales, operations or indeed anything else, we are simply a phone call or email away.

What do the support mechanisms look like?
Lifetime support is delivered in a wide variety of ways within the iOB Business Network. We like to focus on 3 support pillars for every partner, namely training, live support and continuous development.

This ensures we can cater to the needs of every partner and have the support mechanisms in place that are most appropriate for their individual needs.

Initial training
The first pillar of our support mechanism comes in the form of our 2 day training programme. When a partner joins our Network they benefit from 2 days of live training, currently delivered online using screen sharing software, due to the current social distancing guidelines.

This helps us provide vital knowledge, experience and guidance to our partners about how to launch their Digital Agencies. The focus of day one is very much on our technology platforms whilst day two is centred around the marketing and operational side of the business.

As a result, our partners finish training with a solid foundation and base from which to start contacting local businesses to build a sales pipeline.

Live support
We believe that it is important for our partners to have the ability to speak to our support team once they have completed their initial training with us. For this reason, we provide all partners with 3 key ways to contact our support team.

Firstly, we provide dedicated telephone support. This means as a partner, simply pick up the phone and call us with any questions relating to all aspects of your Digital Agency. Whether it is getting the right answer to a question posed by a prospective or existing client, or whether you want to bounce ideas, our team is happy to help.

The next element of live support comes in the form of email support. We operate a support ticketing system which means anytime our partners email us with a query, we assign a support ticket to the most appropriate member of our support team to investigate further. This ensures we can fully troubleshoot and provide a full audit trail to partners about how their query was resolved.

The final component of our live support comes in the form of our integrated helpdesk that is built within our technology platforms. Our partners have the ability to search our helpdesk articles to access a wealth of information relating to every element of our technology.

Looking at future support initiatives, we are currently looking to implement ‘live chat’ within our partner dashboard so our partners can request help in real time by chatting with a dedicated support agent.

Continuous development
It is great to have live training and lots of different ways to reach out to our specialist support team, for life. However, we aim to take our support mechanisms further by giving each partner access to our famed ‘Learn Centre’. This is a dedicated learning portal we have created to boost the continuous development of our entire Network.

We understand that when someone just like you, joins our Network, they may not have experience in all aspects of business. Therefore, our Learn Centre is principally designed to equip our partners and their team with key transferable skills that can be applied to every aspect of their Digital Agencies.

Our partners can access a range of internally generated online training courses covering sales, marketing, social media and the operational side of running a successful Digital Agency. The Learn Centre content can also be shared with team members as our partners look to grow and scale their businesses.

Summary
As we have seen throughout this blog, our lifetime support is a detailed set of support structures we have deployed throughout our Network. Ensuring we can assist our partners in every area of their Digital Agency is of paramount importance to us as a company.

We value the faith, trust and confidence that our partners place in us when they decide to join our Network. We feel it is important to have the right support processes in place so that our partners can access the support they need, when they need it most.

To find out more about our lifetime support and how we can help you launch a successful Digital Agency, please contact our team today by booking a call here.

Until next time, take care.