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How to guide your clients with remote work Technology Solutions

Written by Denes Purnhauser | Mar 17, 2020

Communication is everything now. You can leverage two tools to communicate clearly your clients and prospect's readiness for remote work. A COVID-19 Remote Work Readiness Audit and a COVID-19 Remote Work Readiness Self Assessment help regain your relevance to your clients and prospects. Demonstrate clarity, direction and professionalism with clear communication.

You and your team are likely overwhelmed by the fact that your clients are looking for guidance, leadership, advice and quick fixes to enable them to work securely in a remote environment. This is an opportunity for you to step up, to lead and engage your clients. You’ll either shine warmth, comfort your clients and show how well you prepared them for situations like this or make it clear what opportunities they missed to create a secure and remote work culture in their organization.

 

Upsell your clients with strategic Quarterly Business Reviews and IT Strategy meetings

 

1. Client Engagement Use Cases and Goals

A. Clients who are prepared and good to go

Your goal is to make sure you comfort the client’s various stakeholders. They will then be able to spread the information internally that their service provider has made all necessary preparations to let them work remotely. This is your chance to engage them and demonstrate all the little pieces needed to get together for this experience. Further, even if everything is good, you can highlight some areas of potential improvement such as policies, continuity plans or security awareness.

 

B. Clients who are not prepared

It might be the result of you dropping the ball or more likely that the client did not want to invest in their infrastructure. What matters is to clear the action items and be able to remediate the issues as soon as possible. You can install Slack quickly, but they have to learn to work in a remote collaborative environment. Your duty is to communicate and set proper expectations and a timeline with them.

 

C. Prospects are open for a talk

All crises engender some opportunities and there is a chance some churned clients now would value your work again, or net-new prospects can be found. The goal is to be able to exhibit leadership, confidence, and professionalism. The assessments can help you to gauge them and to compare their scores with your clients’ scores to show the added value your services provide.


Again we know this is an urgent situation but that’s the exact time that clarity, leadership, and professionalism can be the best message to all stakeholders.

 

2. COVID-19 Remote Work Readiness Audit

This is a complete Report with a questionnaire, scoring, 23 remediation projects, and project roadmaps. Here is a sample report.

This is going to help you to audit clients, show them a score with a breakdown, and follow up with an action plan.

This will help you:

  1. Communicate how prepared clients are to work remotely
  2. Speed up the communication internally and externally
  3. Create a project roadmap and set deployment priorities with clients
  4. Remote work projects are templated and can be exported to Connectwise & Autotask for quick delivery by your team

 

Completion time around 15-20 minutes per client; produces a report supporting a remote meeting.

 

3. COVID-19 Remote Work Readiness Self Assessment Explained

This is a web-based mini-survey with automated scoring and PDF report generation.

This is something you can easily send over to clients and that they can complete alone. They’ll get the results immediately and contact you for further actions. Streamline your communication and provide guidance on what needs to be done to work securely from home.

This will help you:

  1. Speed up the communication internally and externally
  2. Assess many individuals and clients easily (even prospects through social media) with the Self-Assessment Grader
  3. Quickly generate education reports that can be delivered and updated online


Completion by your clients and prospects takes 2-3 minutes and produces an educational and scoring PDF. As this is an online survey you can put this onto your website with a lead magnet or post it to social media.

You are going to be able to manage this tribulation of chaos with confidence, leadership and professionalism.

 

4. Structure and topics of the Assessments

We have created five Categories to drive conversations with clients.

A. Remote Work Readiness

The score shows how well the organization is prepared for working remotely. The first part is the readiness of the Remote Work infrastructure such as home computers and networks, the second part is the available applications to perform high-quality remote work.

 

B. Remote Work Capabilities

The score shows how well the organization is prepared for working remotely. The first part is the culture, best practices, and performance by working remotely. The second part is ensuring all critical aspects of remote work are covered with policies and that employees are trained for them.

 

C. Network Readiness

The score shows how well the organization's infrastructure is prepared for the demand of the majority of employees working remotely. One aspect is the central internet connection's capacity to be able to handle the increased two-way traffic on the corporate network. The other aspect is ensuring the internal network infrastructure doesn’t have bottlenecks to block the overall performance and reliability.

 

D. Business Continuity Plan

The score shows how well the organization's business can feasibly operate without disruption. One aspect is the readiness of the IT infrastructure to be able to operate. The other is related to the processes, education, awareness and communication capabilities.

 

E. Enhanced Security Measures

The scores show how well the organization is ready to work remotely within a secure environment. One aspect is to increase the individual user's security while working from home offices and on not-so-reliable networks. The other aspect is to enhance the network's security for potential cyber security incidents.

 

The COVID-19 Readiness Audit has detailed descriptions and assessment for all 10 sections of the 5 categories. The COVID-19 Impact Self Assessment has only 10 questions qualifying to the different topics.

 

5. The Process to get the Audit and Self Assessment

Follow the instructions here:

A. Existing Managed Services Platform paying clients

You do not need anything - just add the solution set to your account.

If you are an existing client, log in to the portal and follow this link and add the solution set to your account. Then you can start using the content right away.

B. If you are Virtual-C / Sea-Level / IT Nation Evolve / TAG Member

You do have a 3 client free account based on our Strategic Partnership. You do not need a paid account for up to 3 clients.

You have the account already, log in to the portal and follow the link and add the solution set to your account. Contact us on the chat so we can add the additional general tool onboarding videos to your account. The solution set is free and you can use it for up to three clients.

C. You are not a member yet

If you do not have account with us, contact us to make an appointment.

 

6. Set up and Use the Assessments

 

Using the COVID-19 Remote Work Readiness Assessment Audit

Here is a walkthrough how to use the Readiness Audit

Using the COVID-19 Remote Work Self Assessment

Here is a walkthrough how to use the Self Assessment

Thanks for all the hard work and contributing members. We are sending you updates and welcome any feedback!