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Spotlight on Professional Services

A day in the life of Nick Harper

With seven and a half years experience at QAS it's fair to say Nick has seen some amazing changes at QAS. From the Technical Support team in 1998, Nick is now a Lead Consultant within QAS' Professional Services team.

"As a consultant I meet customers, partners and prospects across all industry sectors with our account managers. This is something which is crucial to Professional Services and QAS as we get to hear the challenges and needs of our customers which can then be fed back to our Sales and Product Management teams and, in turn, shape the development and roadmap of future solutions."

The QAS Professional Services team combine their industry knowledge and technical expertise to help clients achieve their strategic data integrity objectives through the implementation and use of QAS software.

This includes post sales support with training, integration and accreditation of purchased products, but Nick finds the most interesting part of the role is the pre-sales work where Professional Services provide data audits.

"We're able to look at organisations' data management. How data enters the system, where it is used and what for. We discuss data goals to better understand requirements. With knowledge of QAS's solution, we are able to implement a plan."

"The plan may include a number of solutions; services and products which can range from helping with data migration to deduplication and standardisation. Multiple databases may include different formats and multiple entries, and incorrect data with misspellings and poorly formatted addresses."

"The most engaging piece of work we've tackled was for a financial services organisation selling products such as current accounts, mortgages and ISAs. Data management had become a boardroom issue as the organisation was keen to improve the productivity of its staff, the accuracy of its data and the satisfaction of its customers. The business' previous process was paper based which is still quite common. This was delaying authentication and causing unnecessary risk and cost to the business. It was also causing delays to the end user as they had to wait for verification until they could use their account. The customer wanted to change this and a workshop was held with Professional Services to address the issue.

The most challenging area of this project was the change that had to take place within the organisation. The team were used to the old processes and it was a great challenge to change peoples' mindsets and agree a different way of working moving forwards. Reassurance is sometimes the biggest part of the job since organisations put their faith in QAS and our solutions. This is what is so exciting at QAS as the Professional Services team can really make a difference to the way people work on a day to day basis. Simple processes and data management solutions from QAS can benefit a department and, over time the whole way, the organisation collects, uses and maintain its contact database. A solution was proposed to electronically authenticate its customers, checking their existence. This led to checks taking minutes and new customer acquisition rates increasing.

The final result was that this particular financial services company were able to quickly and easily prove that a customer is who they said they are, and authentication of an individual has become a logical process that the organisation is happy with."

"At QAS it's not about our customers needing a particular QAS solution but rather how our solution can be adapted to fit their needs. Once the adapted solution is up and running we discuss it with the QAS Product Management team to shape it into our core product offerings - this way others can benefit. This also means that we're able to get involved in many different projects and grow our knowledge, further benefiting our customers. QAS have highly experienced people keen to listen to customer requirements and apply their knowledge accordingly. It is an exciting time for us."

For more information about QAS Professional Services and how they can help you, please click here.