Two months ago, we were all living in a different world. The need for social distancing has upended the way so many of us do business and the effects have been felt both here at Pioneer Technology and across our client-base. Today we reflect on how we’ve risen to the challenge.
One of our primary areas of focus as an IT provider is in creating IT infrastructure and systems that can effectively connect and support large volumes of devices. Historically and now, we work with a lot of long-term care facilities that fit this model very well. As a result of COVID-19, this was one of the very first specific healthcare sectors to experience major disruption. Facilities had to quickly change their policies and procedures and communicate this with the large wave of family members eager and entitled to updates about their family members.
To help our clients solve this problem, we launched a new service within a week to make it simple to provide quick and important updates. Facilities were able to set up this automated information hotline with a dedicated phone number as well as have the ability to record their own, custom messages as many times as needed. This could be done by typing the message, and voice dictation technology took over to create the recording. We had over two dozen facilities take advantage of this technology.
To learn more about our work with Long Term Care in handling the impacts of Covid-19, check out our feature in Chattanooga Trend Magazine!
Of course, many of our other clients are not in long-term care, and they had IT needs of their own. The Chattanooga Tourism Co., for example, was facing their own kind of disruption challenges. In partnership with other organizations, they were tasked with creating and launching an online auction entirely via remote work- none of which they’d ever done before!
“If [Pioneer Technology] hadn’t gotten us up and running on our laptops, I could never have built the auction or collaborated with our marketing team via Microsoft Teams,” said Michelle Lawson, Director of Convention and Visitor Services. “All this is being done remote from our homes. So really they can take pride in having helped us generate funds for local partners and the United Way.”
Our Own Experience with Remote Work
One aspect of this pandemic that affected us too was the transition from being in the office 5 days a week to most of our teammates working remotely from home. We are a Microsoft Partner and are familiar with Teams, but generally were always on the implementation end of it, not the user side! When this pandemic hit, we were forced to look at our own processes and ways of getting stuff done.
Overall, our experience with remote work has been pretty good! As we would imagine with almost any company, we started off a bit slow and clunky with video calls. But after a couple weeks, it became clear that having remote work capabilities was not a hindrance – in some ways, it made work even more productive. There are clear benefits to having the flexibility to work from home, and whether our internal policies change, now we know we can make it work. We imagine this realization will make waves in many industries, and are prepared to receive an increase of requests from our existing and future clients for remote work options.
Oft Repeated, But Rings True
At Pioneer Technology, the relationships we build with our clients are at the heart of the services we provide. We strive to add value to all organizations we count as clients and will never offer you cookie-cutter solutions. It’s not in our DNA. As COVID-19 continues to impact organizations in unexpected ways, we are working hard to innovate new ways to help clients with their changing and evolving service needs. Call 423-961-5096 to set up your own Disruption Assessment. To learn more, please email us at Success@PioneerIT.com.