Newsletter Spring 2022

Meet the New Faces at DSL

Our continued investment in the business has seen us create a new position of Support, Installation and Training Manager.  Taking up this position is Stefan Mincher, who joined the business on the 7th of March.

Stefan brings a wealth of experience in customer service and running busy help desks and he is very much looking forward to engaging with our clients and to ensuring we continue to focus on fantastic service levels. Stefan and his team will also have responsibility moving forward for the successful onboarding of new clients and helping those existing clients now eager to migrate to the cloud and our software as a service with all its associated benefits (more on this later).

We are also delighted to welcome Luke Steadman who joined the business in January as Support Technician.

Fresh from securing his master’s degree at Nottingham University, Luke already has plenty of real-world experience supporting IT users across the globe and has relocated from Berkshire to Manchester to join us and progress his career.

Benefits of moving to the cloud

All new clients, and more and more existing clients are using their Paragon software hosted in the cloud (Software as a Service or more commonly referred to as SaaS). But what has led to this shift away from having the software installed on local PCs or local network systems?

There are a whole host of good business reasons.

  • Reduced IT management costs. We look after the computer environment that runs our software. You simply need devices which can connect to the internet. As a result, we can significantly reduce or in some cases completely take away the headache of managing your core IT infrastructure and associated costs
  • Flexibility of where you work and how you access your systems Having your software installed in our AWS cloud, means it is accessible 24/7 from any location with suitable internet access and a portable device (Windows/Mac)
  • Business continuity If you can’t get to the office, or your in-office IT is compromised (fire, theft, flood, power outage etc) you can still access your system from any internet connected alternate location.
  • Scalability Traditional computing often means that your business growth requires expensive ‘step changes’ in infrastructure, storage, processing capability etc. With a SaaS solution, you can increase your IT capability as easily as turning a dial. You just pay for what computing capability you need, when you need it.
  • Backup – we automatically take daily backups of your data providing peace of mind that in the event of an issue arising which needs data reinstating, we can go back 30 days.
  • Access to new features Some of the exciting new features being released are only able to work in the cloud. These include being able to pre-authorise credit cards facilitating weekly payment collection and instant sign up for new clients.

Speak to us about how we can help you make that journey to the cloud

Support Update

Email challenges

The ability to email invoices and statements (or alternatively emailing links to the invoices/statements) is a very popular feature of Paragon and has been in use for several years. However, the way the technology works, sees Paragon communicate with your in-house email system (or the DSL preferred bulk email service Sparkpost), pass the information over, and then these email systems take over and issue the emails accordingly. Once the instruction to send has been passed across, Paragon has no control over the receiving email system’s ability to allow safe passage to the recipient’s inbox. Failure for an email landing can be down to a number of local issues and more often than not are related to settings on the receiving end.

If you use this facility and do encounter issues with emails getting through, and experience this being used as a reason for non-payment of your invoices, we strongly advise that you get in touch with the affected customers and ask them to check their settings and make the necessary adjustments at their end to ensure your communications land safely

Support Hours

Just a reminder that our official Support Hours, and the basis upon which we levy monthly/annual support fees are Monday to Friday 8.00am to 5.00pm and Saturday 10:00am to 4.00pm. This excludes Public Holidays.

We appreciate that the nature of the work our clients undertake, can mean that the need for assistance arises outside these times. Our Team may occasionally check the online chat system for notified issues out of these hours, but this is purely on an ad hoc and very much voluntary basis with no guaranteed response or fix time.

Customer Satisfaction

Increasing numbers of clients take the time when they receive their call closure email to let us know what they thought of the service from the team. To all those who responded in 2021, thank you so much. You told us that for nearly 93% of your tickets, you felt you received Great Service

Your feedback is invaluable in helping to shape our service and be assured, our new Support Manager Stefan will be reviewing your future responses with interest. Just a reminder that every completed survey is entered into a quarterly draw for an Amazon voucher. Our winner in the draw for the quarter from October to December 2021 was Craig’s Farm Dairy in Weymouth.