QoT Solutions Reviews 2021.
Most South African companies have had a challenging couple of years, adapting to the massive changes a worldwide pandemic has had on our economies, our ways of working, our people and their personal lives. We are no different.
We thank our lucky stars on a daily basis that our company has survived these difficult times – albeit not without sacrifice. We gave up our offices, some of us gave up our salaries, our comfort and in general our way of life. It was at times an overwhelming journey, but we have proudly survived, adapted and, in the last year, begun to thrive.
"Improved Communication"
2021 saw us working hard on improving the way we communicate. We realised that, although we have great relationships with our clients, not being able to meet with them
face-to-face and not walking the floors of the massive office buildings we once called home, had us at a disadvantage. Both our head office and our people on site have become very accustomed to working remotely. In fact, we have all agreed that we find ourselves way more productive in the comfort of our own homes, and so do our clients. But, maintaining relationships is definitely a lot more difficult.
Our business is very definitely a people-focussed business. Whether we are engaging with our staff or our clients, we know that the key to a successful business is being close enough to the people to understand their challenges, frustrations and, of course, the things that they are doing well. So yes, 2021 really saw us bedding down the way that we communicate with both our staff and our clients. Our account managers started to get involved in a lot of the project stand-ups and spent time working very closely with our staff on project-specific issues or deliverables. This level of detail helped us maintain and grow our relationships and made sure that our staff had the right level of support and input into their personal development.
"Warm welcome to our new clients"
As far as new business is concerned, we focussed a lot of our energy on our digital marketing in a bid to make contact with a world we had no physical access to. We were lucky enough to make contact with a few new clients, who were happy with our service offering and gave us the opportunity to perform Quality Improvement Assessments on their landscapes. As a result of these assessments, we were able to provide people, technology and automation solutions to help them improve the quality of their products and their processes.
We are very proud with the partnerships we have formed with our new clients over this past year, it really excites us to be able to contribute in a meaningful way to the businesses that are growing our economy. It especially humbles us to work with new companies that have put their faith in our company and the people and technology solutions we provide.
We also had quite a bit of fun setting up our training department to provide practical and interactive training solutions for people working remotely. I think we are all largely leveraging Udemy these days, which is a fantastic solution for training. However, the one aspect that is missing from Udemy is the personalised approach. We started our first quarter in 2021 running our graduate programme (so really testing our set-up on our own people) which produced some great professionals that we are happy to have watched grow from strength to strength, and whom our clients quickly snatched up – thank you for that.
‘How to Test Software’ and ‘Selenium’
We also had opportunities to run our ‘How to Test Software’ and ‘Selenium’ courses for our clients. We were able to do all of this remotely and with some proper, focussed interaction with our delegates.
This year we have many plans to keep on working on our approach to growing our relationships with our clients and staff. A few of our clients are adopting hybrid-model approaches to working, so this gives us an opportunity to finally have the coffee we have been meaning to have, in person, with our clients. We can’t wait! For our other clients and staff members, we will be blowing their minds with some of the digital campaigns we are planning for the year, and also our continued presence at their meetings and close to the business.
March sees the start of our annual graduate programme, and we have a great bunch of fresh, young minds we are looking forward to working with and seeing grow. We will also be resuming our monthly Free Beer Friday – the beer is really an excuse to lure our colleagues and industry specialists back to our offices to be a part of our technology and solutions showcases.
But the big focus for our company this year is on our expanding IT world. 2021 gave us the opportunity to extend our footprint to both Saudi Arabia and Mauritius. Our employees also got the opportunity to work from home, which in a multi-cultural company often means outside of our borders. We couldn’t have done all of this, and made a success out of it, without the various technologies and interfaces that have been introduced to our worlds over the past decade or so.
Our focus here at QoT is to make sure that we contribute to ensuring these applications, that are bringing our world closer together, do exactly that.
High quality, all the time, every time.
Wishing you and your team a productive and prosperous 2022!
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