Being more than ‘different for different’s sake’
Every month this year the world has seemingly thrown at us a new emotionally charged challenge. The concept of ‘plight to fight’ has been more real in 2020, than ever before. We now live in a different world, every single aspect of our lives has now changed indefinitely. Be that at home with the family, the workplace with colleagues, or our social lives with friends.
In working with my teams as we prepared and planned for FY21 we decided to stop, review and reflect on our ability to serve our customers in this altered reality.
I promptly realised that there is little that differentiates us from a technical standpoint;
- We’re all typically targeting the same kind of demographic.
- We all offer, virtually, the same technical solutions albeit with more flexibility.
- We partner with the same technology vendors, bar some strategic ones, and
- We all address similar needs.
There were (and still are), in contrast, some areas in which we differed hugely:
- We were highly focused on servicing a marketplace that is commonly under-served and overcharged, an unfortunate trend in this country for decades.
- We possessed, group wide, an undeniable focus on customer service, evidenced by an NPS of +80 and confirmed by ambitious high potential organisations like Holman Webb.
- We are amongst the minority of providers in market that can offer ‘true’, or authentic Hybrid-IT.
- We’re unique in our focus on only one public cloud offering (Microsoft Azure) and became Australia’s fastest growing Azure practice.
- Our team is committed to ‘our’ journey, evidenced by Macquarie Cloud Services having been ranked within the Top 20 ‘Best Places to work in Australia’ for the 2nd year running.
Thereafter it became a ‘lightbulb’ moment, we could head on into FY21 attempting to compete on bells, whistles and widgets, or we could simply park all the technical marketing jargon, and tell it to our customers (and potential customers) like it is…….Macquarie Cloud Services is different!
