In conversation: Dermot Glynn, DGTek

The right hardware and services can create frictionless movement from the homeworking space to the office

Trade

Dermot Glynn, DGTek

In association with DGTek

Dermot Glynn is managing director of DGTek. In this interview he discusses how the company keeps its customers connected during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With the rise of remote working, how can you ensure that your customers have a seamless experience when they call your office?

It’s a very good question and certainly in an age where we literally have hundreds of ways to communicate, it’s very important for businesses to have a consistent, dependable, secure communications channel back to their customer. Having a scalable business phone system that allows for a physical phone, a Web phone and a softphone compatible with Windows or Mac, Android or iOS is imperative to ensuring this happens.

GoToConnect has all these features and allows for the seamless transfer of calls from physical desk phones to a mobile app. Its ‘find me/follow me’ setup ensures calls reach the right person every time. This is very useful where businesses may have several hunt groups or want to direct calls to various internal departments. At the start of the pandemic, DGTek was able to switch our customers’ telephones to a working from home model in a matter of minutes and hours as opposed to days and weeks meaning from an end customer point of view the switch was seamless and from the business’ perspective was timely and cost effective.

Many businesses have been using Microsoft Teams in recent months, how can this be integrated with GoToConnect?

GoToConnect can be found in the MS Teams app source, so once the user has their passwords, they can integrate the system themselves. MS Teams is constantly improving making it straightforward for DGTek to provide the integrated telephony piece. The key reasons we see our customers moving to GoToConnect with Teams is LogMeIn is a leader in reliability, tech efficiency, customer support and value for money. Opting for GoToConnect with Micorosft Teams provides a integration to Teams but provides great value for money for our customers with a fixed cost per month.

As companies have adapted to agile working, security has become a major concern. What kind of security guarantee can you offer customers?

LogMeIn maintains a cryptographic standard that aligns with recommendations from industry groups, government publications, and other reputable standards groups. The cryptographic standard is periodically reviewed. Additionally, the malware protection anomalous activity alerting capabilities are actively deployed and monitored with alerts indicating potential malicious activity sent to the appropriate response teams for resolution or mitigation. GoToConnect’s integrated service offering utilises LogMeIn’s proprietary identity management platform for customer provisioning, offering single sign-on (SSO) and integration directly with LogMeIn’s GoToMeeting platform via API.

In order to provide redundancy and call failover the service uses a containerised microservice mesh which self-discover and self-recover in the event of an outage and are designed to fail-over between datacenter’s automatically. GoToConnect operates on a 99.99% SLA, with 13 data centres globally our customers receive the most secure and reliable service.

With more staff working from home than ever before, many companies have seen their phone charges increase dramatically. What can GoToConnect do to keep costs low?

Gotoconnect is a user licence-based model with each user getting 2,500 mins per month to 52 countries globally – including calls to mobiles. To put this in perspective, 2,500 mins is 40 hours of talking each month so when these minutes are pooled across an entire business, a typical 10 user system will have 25,000 minutes per month. As the chances of using all those minutes is extremely low, most of DGTek’s GoToConnect customers end up with a fixed monthly bill – an advantageous position for any business to be in.

What percentage of your clients are looking to continue remote working into the foreseeable future?

At the moment, we have a 60/40 split remote workers versus those back in the office. What we’re seeing is that whilst the GoToConnect solution gives businesses the flexibility of allowing all staff to work from home, some of our customers need to have an onsite presence in order to best serve their own end customers. Then there are some businesses who are working to a combination of remote and office workers as they try to adhere to the new working guidelines. And then there are those businesses who can fully facilitate a work from home model for their staff. In each of these scenarios, the flexible functionality of GoToConnect really comes into play allowing easy call redirection as needed. The end result is a seamless connection between staff and end customers – no matter who’s working from where or calling from where.

I think it’s worth keeping in mind, though, that the just because you can work from home and have the tools to do so doesn’t always make it the best option for every employee. What this current world crisis has taught us in DGTek is that a balance between home and office life is key. I do believe that there will be a return the office in the future, however giving businesses the flexibility of allowing their staff to operate securely from home if and when required, like when a child is sick or if you need to let a tradesman into the house to fix a plumbing or a heating issue, creates a great working environment that ultimately helps grow productivity. Most definitely the last few months have inextricably changed how we perceive working from home and will most certainly result in some businesses moving to a predominately remote working experience.