An interview with Debbie Bissell, HR & Operations Director at ClickThrough Marketing. In this case study, Debbie explains first-hand about transitioning to Fifosys, the support and relationship we build with our clients and how our solutions have helped ClickThrough Marketing to grow as a business.

Read more: https://www.fifosys.com/case-study-clickthrough-marketing

Transcript:

Hi, Debbie. Thank you so much for joining us today and taking some time to talk about Click Through Marketing's role with in partnership with Fifosys and kind of how you've been working together just to get started. Could you tell us a little bit about the business, your role and sort of how long you've been working with Fifosys?

So Click Through is a digital marketing agency. We have been in existence for 21 years. So we started out just focusing on SEO and a digital journey has progressed. So has the business. We've got two offices, Litchfield and Manchester, and I've been with the business for nine years and in my current role I'm HR and Operations Director and the operations element is the part that encompasses it.

So when I'm not looking after and supporting the people in the business, I'm also making sure that they've got the IT equipment and set up that enables them to do their job. And as a business we have hybrid working. So in conjunction with the offices, most of our team work predominantly from home. So we made the move to Fifosys coming up for just about three years ago. It's probably about three years ago I was doing the procurement process and my scoring matrix.

And interviewing Nick and the Fifosys team to understand what they could bring to us and how they could support us, and we did initially a couple of projects with them sort of test the waters, see how that worked and then we transitioned away from our previous IT provider because we had identified that they weren't fit for where we needed to go as a business and what we needed for the team and what we also needed to be able to provide our clients with.

In terms of a confidence about business continuity, and making sure that we were a digital IT company as well as a digital marketing company. So the move away from antiquated servers not having the level of security that we needed, so many things which is not my natural domain to work in. So part of the reason for choosing to work with Fifosys is that the language they spoke in.

Wasn't always heavily technical. Everybody that we've worked with has been able to explain in layman's terms.

The reasoning for these requirements why we need to do this? The benefits of the business and then I go back into the Click Through business going right. There's this project, there's this investment that we need and This is why a lot of it was about future proofing and making us good for the future. And as we've become more hybrid that's become really more evident.

In terms of Fifosys' focus and why we stay with them, we have great relationships with everybody that we encounter.

So Nick is our account manager. We have monthly conversations and other ad hoc conversations outside of that and we cover everything. So it's a relationship that's built over the years and Nick and the focuses team fully understand click through who we are, how we operate and what matters to us.

So I think we've pretty much done every project and every recommendation that's ever come from Fifosys.

So that's been the move to SharePoint, the move away from servers enhance security with Azure and then other things that we've needed along the way.

Some have been smoother than others to manage, but we got them all completed and everything is in a really good place now.

That's great, Debbie. Thank you. You've sort of half answered my next question, which is always good.

I'm a bit prone to that, sorry.

No, that's no, that's perfect. So then over the last three years, three or four years Click Through Marketing, you've evolved and your dynamic operations in line with the business demand and having quite a supportive culture for the team members. How have the solutions that Fifosys have advised and implemented support of those changes for you?

In simple terms, it's made my life easy and I get less it queries across my desk, so there's a confidence that when we have a technical issue or something crops up that we can take it to focus and it will be resolved. Some are easily resolved, some are more complex and get escalated to a specialist, a senior within their business.

And sometimes it's about them working with us to understand what the solution is, because we might want something that perhaps.

Was it always there? And Nick has definitely worked with me on some things that have helped us to understand how to make things work better.

Whatever the future might bring, whatever the future business model is, we're now ready to do that without going, "oh, my God, we've got two years of projects to complete".

Now, every project has added value added security. It sounds daft to say, but everything we've done with Fifosys just makes us run better. It gives me Peace of Mind that I then explain to our MD and our CEO. So they don't necessarily want the detail, they just want to know "Debbie, is it done?" Yes, it's done. "That's fine", and have the confidence that it's been done right.

That sounds like all the boxes are being ticked, then if it's all-encompassing, that's what we want to hear. Now switching into sort of quite a specific topic, cybersecurity, we all know it's very, very serious. It's something that every business needs to take seriously. How do you feel Fifosys has supported you and the business in addressing that as an area and how important has it been for you or was it prior to your relationship with them?

I might need a reminder of that question at another point.

So it is very important to us and it was one of the factors that made us choose to go with Fifosys because it was a service they offered with other agencies. It was often a bolt on with a third party and I was never comfortable with that. It's like I'd build a relationship with you and then I have to build a relationship with somebody else here. I speak with Nick, we talk about things.

So in terms of what we get offered?

There are regular updates. There's the opportunity to go to cyber forums. It's something that I personally within the business am always very mindful of and I have my own training that I created that's specific to our business and the nature of phishing attacks, spam emails that we get because I know that there's generic support and training out there. But I know what we get targeted with.

And for folks, just know that as well.

And as a business, if we ever get anything dubious, we can just raise it. Things can be blocked, updated, we get the dark Web reports.

Nick and I know where the issues are within our business and where our risk people, and we do everything we can to minimise that risk and protect us as a business.

So it's just for me, it's just woven into part of the things that we consider. It's not like a thing that we activate every week. It's constant. It's all the time. There's updates, there's notifications. But we will also flag things that we've received, which I've done recently with a very dubious e-mail.

Yeah, there was a few of those doing the rounds in December, actually. But no, that's really important. I think that you see it from the angle of it should be part of the discussion, not a bolt on which is a mistake. I think a lot of other businesses can make what they think it's a bolt on and not from the ground up.

Yeah, and I never liked it being a bolt on. It was like, well, we don't, you know, things like penetration testing. They would go, oh, we use our third party supplier. No, I want everything in one place and it feels like they should be together. They're not separate entities.

If you you know we've implemented Azure and we've got the two factor authentication and sometimes it's a bit of a headache and sometimes it makes us pull our hair out. But what that means is that I have a confidence that it's protecting us.

If it was simple and it always worked and it was easy, then that means somebody could override it, exploit it. I know that's always the risk and we can only do so much. But if we can do as much as we possibly can and also for us having a business where everybody is mindful to be suspicious.

But that then is not always the focus. That's down to us as an employer to make people aware that they have a responsibility.

If you think it's dodgy, it probably is.

So send it to Fifosys, they'll have a look at the e-mail. They'll look at the history. They may see something with their tools that we can't see. And they provide that and people will do that. And I think that's really important.

And how with with that being provided as service by Fifosys, is how was the uptake internally at your end with people having to follow those processes and how easy did Fifosys make that sort of make that switch for people's habits?

From our point of view, internally it was really easy. When we started, we had office days so there would always be a technician on site and that was a really big support and helped in bed fibosis into the business. People know that they were approachable and we would have specific people that came. We would welcome with them, with open arms. They'd just be made to feel part of the team and it was like raise a ticket or just go and speak to them and then.

The technicians would do a floor walk. Just check in on everybody. Is anything happening? Any queries?

Because not everybody raises something as a ticket, but if there's somebody there, they'll go. Actually, yeah. Do you know what? This always takes an age to load. This is glitching. I can't get in.

And sometimes in the early days it was very important to have that face to face contact. And I think that really helped cement people's faith that we had a good IT provider that they could go to. And I know we have certain people who just raise everything all of the time. We have big users of the support desk.

And then we have other people who don't. But if there's somebody in the office and they can connect with them, then they'll pick it up so that two, those two options of communication face to face and the support desk actually was the thing that really cemented it. And I think people were just really pleased to feel that there was a provider available when they needed it, which wasn't always the experience we'd had before.

It felt like we had to be fitted in and now? We've never had a problem where somebody's gone, "Hello Debbie. I'm constantly chasing and nobody comes back to me." That just doesn't happen. Now what they might say is or something's got stuck and I'll just drop Nick an e-mail and go. This is the ticket. Can you have a look? Boom.

And it might be something simple an authorisation something we haven't communicated. Something's changed, but it just gets dealt with. So people internally have a confidence that Fifosys will sort it. The only issue sometimes is saying to people if your laptop keeps crashing, have you let them know? No, but we can't fix it if you don't tell us the problem that sometimes is the biggest mindset that we have left now.

“It's broken.” Did you give somebody the chance to look into it? Have you done an update? “No.” Have you switched it off and on again? “Yeah”, all of the usual.

There's definitely some user errors there rather than anything else to do with that.

Yeah. Yeah, that's a very delicate way of putting it. Nick knows that we do have a few of those.

It's good because it sounds like the Fifosys team is very much a part of your team, which makes all the difference from a psychological level for people who need to then contact them. Final question I've got for you. So what 3 words have you used to describe your partnership with Fifosys?

OK, so I put down friendly, trusted, and you've just hinted at the other one, part of our team. But they're just an extension of our business.

Fantastic. I think that is everything I had to ask you, Debbie. Thank you so much for joining us today to run through these questions and give us your feedback.