Peter Moriarty: If you're a business owner or an executive
in charge of managing technology in your business, you may have
heard of the term White Glove service. And in this video, I'm
going to share with you what that actually means, and why
it's important to you as a business owner to consider why
this might be useful to help you save time and get more
efficiency in onboarding your team and take advantage of tech
tools to make your scaling process simpler. My name is
Peter Moriarty, and we help business owners with their tech
tools. And we make sure that business owners have the right
technology strategy in place so they can grow and scale and
build more successful teams and businesses. Today, we're going
to talk about white glove service and what this actually
is what it actually means. And effectively, this is a term
that's come out of the vendor space in the IT world. But I'm
going to deconstruct a little bit about what this actually
means. Now, this has to do with the onboarding of your team and
onboarding of staff members when you get them set up, and the
technology tools and the technology devices that are
involved when you actually go to onboard and get a new person set
up inside the business. Now, a white glove service means that
when you actually set up a new staff member, or a new team
member, that their computer is already set up for them, think
of it like a concierge service, you go to a fancy hotel, and
they're going to take that bag for you, they're gonna put it up
in the room, they're gonna have your favorite champagne, there,
they're going to have you towels nice and warm and ready to go.
That's the kind of thing or the experience that we want to
create for an employee when they get started on their first day.
Now, everyone knows the nightmare situation of the
opposite, which is your onboarding new staff member and
their email isn't ready by the time they've got to get work
started. And they go to sit down at their desk. And maybe the
computer hasn't been fully provisioned, or it takes half a
day for it to set up the apps and the programs and all those
kinds of things. Not only is that lost productivity, but it's
also going to give the team member a pretty poor impression
of them starting with your company. And of course, the
experience of that is really important because you want them
to be productive. But also you want to I would say in my
opinion, honor that employee by ensuring that when they start,
they actually have all the tools in place. So they don't add to
their stress and anxiety of starting a new role. And so a
white glove technology service means that when an employee
comes in the asset, or the it resource is all ready to rock
and roll so they can start productive work. Now, they're
probably not going to be jumping straight into productive work on
their first day. But if they can, at a minimum, attend
meetings, and emails, and if they're working from home,
connect with their team on the various communication tools that
you're going to be using within the business. These are the
kinds of things that you want to have ready to go. So they're not
waiting around to try and get started with work. While you're
fumbling getting the technology, right, there's three things that
are core components of a white glove service, and actually
making sure that team members are ready to rock and roll, I'm
going to take you through what those look like. Number one is
ensuring that there's the correct it access levels for
each staff member. If they're on the accounting team, then they
probably want to have access to the finance folders and the
right calendars for the finance team. If they're on the customer
service team, then they're going to need to have access to cold
scripts and anything else that they need to work with their
team members there. Obviously, if they're an executive, they're
going to be going through an onboarding process for
executives, which is probably going to include meeting the
team, but also being able to see across the organization and see
all of the resources across an organization. And so ensuring
that your correct access levels are set up for each team member
is the foundation of that and we have other videos, I'll link
that down below on how you can set up group based permissions
inside Google workspace. So your team can get access to the right
resources. But the day that staff member starts, you have
failed, if they have to ask you, Hey, can I have access to that
document? Or can I have access to the shared drive or can I
have access to that folder, we want to make sure that the day
they are starting, they have the correct access to everything
that they need. Secondly, white glove means shipping the device
directly to the staff member. Now in the old days, where we
had people working from home or working from different offices,
what we would do is we would ship all the devices to a
central location, and then that location would get them ready or
provision them. And then we would send them out to the
individual staff member no matter what office or department
they were in, in the organization nowadays and the
current global pandemic, most team members are currently
working at home or at least in geographically distributed
locations. And so rather than a technology company, if you've
got an external consultancy, or an IT team, if this has been
handled internally, shipping that to the staff member only
after it's been set up, these can actually be configured on
the behalf of the vendor or by an IT consultant and then sent
straight to the staff member so that you the business owner, or
your internal IT team don't need to bother with the onboarding
and provisioning of the technology device. Now, you
might think, well, it's not their job, isn't it his job to
provision devices? Well, what we're seeing is a shift in most
businesses in the mid market and the corporate enterprise space
is that many of their technology teams and especially the
technology leaders want to spend more time on strategic tasks.
And what that means is that they want to be working on the high
level projects, they're going to bring more value to the
organization, then rolling out somebody's laptop and spinning
it up and installing, you know, whatever apps need to be
installed on that machine. Now working with a technology
consultancy externally can make this process easy because what
that means is there's actually less burden on that technology
team internally inside your business. And you can focus more
on those higher value tasks, having a device run up
externally and then shipped directly to a staff member so
they can open the lid and get to work is the best case scenario
for productive workers and keeping your team focused on
what they need to be. Thirdly, I'd like to talk about asset
tracking and protection. Now, when you have a white glove
service, you're actually managing each of the serial
numbers and managing each of the asset tags of the devices. When
you have a pre determined way of onboarding each of your devices,
which is consistent, then those devices will all have the same
amount of security protocols and the same amount of protection
required for those devices. Now, I recently recorded a video
which is on our channel, all about the basic security
processes that you need to have in place. Once your business
grows to above 20 employees. I'll link to that just down
below. And one of the things that is critically important is
actually making sure that each device has the correct
protections with pass codes and access for each person that's
accessing that device. Now, if you happen to be using something
like a Chromebook, then the device access is actually locked
down to your Google workspace account. And a lot of those
technology policies can actually be deployed from the central
workspace admin panel, which is nice and handy. But if you don't
have that setup, right now, then you need to actually manage the
devices individually. So all of this comes together in a what we
call the white glove service, which is making sure that people
have the right access from day one, devices sent straight to a
staff member so they don't have to wait around for them to be
rolled up. And thirdly, they can switch it on and get started
straightaway with access to the right resources. And from there,
your team members are able to get productive from when they
get started. Now if you're interested in configuring or
exploring a white glove policy, what that might look like
internally inside your business, or if you'd like support from
us, then click the link below and you can jump onto an audit
our business services 1000s of businesses all over the world,
helping with technology policy, everything to do with Google
workspace, and the small and medium sized business ecosystem.
If you're an organization that needs help with Google
workspace, whether you're an education, a corporate
enterprise, or a small and medium sized business, we can
help move you in the right direction. If you'd like to
check to our team jumper the link down below. And if you're a
small business owner with less than 20 employees, well you
might be interested in checking out some of our other videos.
We've got plenty of resources available for you, and I look
forward to catching you in the next video. Just a reminder, if
you haven't already, subscribe to our channel or drop us a like
on this video. Please go ahead and do that. If there's
something that you'd like to know drop a comment down below
in the comments and we'll do our best to answer