Almost a year ago, Smart Dolphins outsourced our tier-one reactive service. In other words, all our initial reactive service that our clients required was done outside of our office. We’re now really excited to announce that on September 1st of this year, that role will be coming back in-house.

I am a firm believer in specialization and by extension, outsourcing. And of course, that is the business Smart Dolphins is in so I best be a believer. A company that specializes in a certain role has the opportunity to become very effective at it and gives the opportunity to the company that has hired them to become very good at other things.

This is exactly what happened at Smart Dolphins.

Prior to shifting this tier 1 reactive work outside, we had too many things we were trying to get “right”. The noise of all the reactive work that was coming in made it very difficult for our company to get focused on and become good at the many proactive things we wanted to do.

Removing some of the firefighting from our operations allowed us to do just that. We had the time, space and attention to truly nail our proactive roles. It has all come together VERY nicely.

Now we are going to bring the helpdesk back into the company and focus on that. We’ve always been good at this, but now we’re going to be gooooood. I don’t recall been so excited about an operational change as I am with this one. We have an operational blueprint that I think will be incredibly effective when we go live (and work out the initial bugs). We’re also taking the opportunity to invest in a new, high-end phone system that will open up a world of opportunities and flexibility (This should go live in mid to late September). Last, but not least, we just hired a dedicated Triage technician (Corinne) who will shepherd each and every reactive service request through our Reactive team and to its ultimate conclusion. Within our own four walls, we’ll have a Reactive team that will be a finely tuned machine.

All of this will mean that our clients will be getting an even better end result than they’ve ever had from us. THAT is what excites me most.