Autotask Corporation, the world’s leading provider of hosted IT business management software, today announced how its software has been used to support the continued success of Manchester City FC. In addition to winning the Premier League, Manchester City is an ambitious organisation with a state-of-the-art football academy and a programme of high profile concerts from the likes of Coldplay, U2 and Take That.
Synergy Technology, a leading IT outsourcing and business solutions provider, has been working with Manchester City Football Club for ten years. The plans and investment of the new owner – Sheikh Mansoor – have seen the club rapidly scaling-up its operations. It is a football club looking to compete at the highest level but also an operation that employs 350 staff worldwide and welcomes nearly 50,000 fans every matchday.
Synergy Technology supports MCFC’s IT from back-office to front-of-house on a 24x7x365 basis. As well as call centre support, the company has 5 staff on-site to support the club from board directors to operations staff to ticketing to front-of-house.
While ensuring current needs are met, it has also been crucial to help the club with preparations for future growth. To do this Synergy Technology knew it needed to replace its home-grown system with a software platform that enabled them to deliver the highest levels of support, insight and detail possible. Tony Poole, Managing Director, quickly realised that an overhaul of their service management tools was required in order to deliver the responsiveness, insight and detailed analytics that MCFC needed:“In order to support the customer’s ambitions in terms of monitoring current performance as well as predicting future needs, we needed to find a solution that could evolve and flex to different scenarios. It was almost certain that our needs and the needs of our customer were going to change significantly over time.”
During its procurement process, Synergy Technology reviewed 10 systems before selecting Autotask. At the time, there were more functionally-rich options than Autotask in the marketplace but the key decision factor was Autotask’s ability to develop and adapt to real-world situations.
“We really bought into the people at Autotask, their approach and their understanding of our type of business – managed service provision," confirmed Tony Poole. “We were also impressed with the whole ‘Autotask Ecosystem' and felt that it was a platform that would allow us to grow our business success. As our customer requirements change, our use of Autotask can change.”
Autotask’s customisable workflow means that it can be adapted to suit each customer, reflecting their business, their processes, their helpdesk set-up and their customers. “Autotask is a purpose-built platform specifically designed for managed services providers,” commented Mark Banfield, Managing Director International at Autotask. “We’ve built a dynamic solution that grows with our customers and is strongly positioned worldwide. With over twenty-five staff in Richmond supporting accounts, implementation and support, our clients receive an outstanding level of service from initial implementation to ongoing training so that they can grow their business profitably.”