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How DenaliTEK Uses Process Street to Boost Consistency and Client Happiness

DenaliTEK case study

DenaliTEK is an Anchorage-based IT services company which uses Process Street to perform and track everything from payroll to client maintenance. This lets them provide quality services to their clients more consistently and in less time.

We spoke to their Controller Lisa Clark about how they use Process Street in their business.

The DenaliTEK story

Although it’s important to use, the last thing you want to worry about when running a business is IT. Time and effort spent worrying about what the best software is, how to set it up, how easy it is to use, and so on will only distract you from focusing on what really matters; growing your business.

So why not hand that work to someone else? Someone who knows what your company needs better than you do?

That’s where DenaliTEK comes in.

DenaliTEK is an IT services company which manages all of your IT services for a flat-rate fee to make things simple and easy to deal with.

Aside from providing and managing your technology and services, DenaliTEK also gives IT and helpdesk support to guide you through any computer issues. By remotely accessing your network and machines their technicians can take control of your terminals to diagnose and solve issues from afar.

denalitek it support
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To provide such comprehensive services, DenaliTEK needs a way to track their tasks and consistently perform everything their clients need. With security being paramount, they also have to make sure that their clients maintain their own security systems through updates and best practices every month.

These are just some of the many reasons DenaliTEK uses Process Street.

DenaliTEK uses Process Street for:

  • Documenting processes
  • Managing operations
  • Onboarding employees and clients
  • Performing sales reviews
  • Solidifying client maintenance
  • Creating newsletters

They’ve benefitted from implementing Process Street by:

  • Clarifying incomplete and outdated processes
  • Giving specific instructions for employees to follow
  • Reducing human error (eg, forgetting to do something)
  • Tracking the security status of their clients
  • Being able to see where action needs to be taken

Challenge

After almost 20 years of working in the IT industry, Todd Clark was familiar with the frustrations of small, local businesses getting lost in their own tech (or lack thereof). Even when teaching others how to use Novell and Microsoft products he felt that there was a better way to help these businesses go digital and grow.

DenaliTEK was founded in 2001 to do just that; provide quality IT services from expert technicians without any confusing jargon, unintelligible language, or hidden fees.

The goal was to create a business that could help small Alaskan businesses gain the benefits of IT and use the best tech for their needs without having to focus on it themselves. That way these businesses can focus on their own operations and use their new tech to grow and prosper.

“We at DenaliTEK believe every technology experience must be business driven, well planned and predictable; the actual costs should match the budget” – DenaliTEK, About Us

This transparency means that DenaliTEK relies on maintaining a healthy relationship with their clients in order to keep them – they make a point of not locking in clients with long-term contracts.

As such, they need to be as consistent, precise, and thorough as possible. Any mistake, miscalculation or minor security breach could undermine a client’s confidence in their service, even if the client’s machine was the one causing the issue.

This boiled down to three core problems:

  • Processes were unclear and checklists weren’t monitored
  • Employees could easily forget to carry out certain tasks
  • Client maintenance tasks were difficult to track but vital to their client’s security
denalitek managed services
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At the heart of all of these problems was consistency. It’s hard to reliably provide top-quality services when it’s so difficult to make sure that all of your tasks are performed correctly, and even more so when you don’t have a system in place for monitoring practices like client maintenance.

DenaliTEK needed to find a way to provide that consistency in everything they did. If their processes and practices weren’t reliably followed, their relationship with their clients would suffer.

That’s why Lisa hit the ground running and overhauled their operations with Process Street.

Growing their business with Process Street

By improving their existing processes and tracking their team’s progress, DenaliTEK were able to get on top of their business process management efforts.

Their entire team uses Process Street and their documented checklists to perform tasks quickly and effectively, while managers use features like our template overview screen to quickly see everyone’s progress and what needs doing.

There’s no longer any confusion as to what processes are outdated or what stage any given task is at. Instead, all they need to do is boot up Process Street and open a template to see what checklists and tasks they are assigned to and what’s left to complete.

Documenting processes like this also let DenaliTEK crackdown on human error; it’s hard to forget to do something when you can see your progress and have instructions for every step.

denalitek helping small businesses
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Performing client maintenance is also a cinch thanks to Process Street. Not only can the progress of checklists be easily monitored, but every task can be given instructions for how to complete them, meaning that no-one wastes time wondering how to do their work.

Results

With quality and consistency being so important to keep their clients happy (and secure), we asked Lisa how Process Street had affected these aspects.

Our processes were messy when I first joined; we had recurring checklists that were six months old that were still active. So I went in and cleaned it up, and that’s when I found out how fabulous Process Street was

For example, when our salespeople win an opportunity, they have a lot of small, standardized tasks that they need to do in a certain way every time, but they kept forgetting. Like, “does the date go first or after the client name?”, and that makes it hard to search and do some of our internal tasks.

Process Street solved that by letting us write instructions for every task, and putting them together in checklists to follow step-by-step.” – Lisa Clark, DenaliTEK

Even without using advanced features like process automation, DenaliTEK has seen massive benefits to consistency across their company. They know precisely which tasks are performed, can give specific instructions to standardize practices, and do so while maintaining an effective, secure, and affordable service to local businesses.

Helping local companies grow is difficult, but DenaliTEK is providing expert technology and IT services to let local businesses focus on what matters most; their business.

Taking it to the next level

DenaliTEK continues to serve local businesses by giving expert, reliable, affordable IT services. It’s a promise they’ve made and it’s a promise they’ll stick to; their clients can rely on that.

To do this, they’re looking for ways to further optimize their current processes with Process Street. They’ve already seen huge improvements in their consistency, and so now the focus moves to business efficiency.

denalitek going forwards
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Process Street integrates with Zapier to let you automate your processes; a practice which Lisa was excited to get started with. Zapier links your apps together so that they can automatically take care of the work you hate doing (such as data management).

Conditional logic is another feature that DenaliTEK are eager to get started with, letting them create customizable, reactive processes which will only show you the tasks relevant to what you’re doing. For example, their client onboarding checklist could show tasks based on the package that the client chose.

Whatever they do, we’re looking forward to supporting them in taking the IT strain off of local businesses!

“I found out how fabulous Process Street was.”

Lisa Clark, Controller at DenaliTEK

Have any interesting use cases for Process Street (or documented processes in general)? We’d love to head from you in the comments below!

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Ben Mulholland

Ben Mulholland is an Editor at Process Street, and winds down with a casual article or two on Mulholland Writing. Find him on Twitter here.

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