Change is constant!  This October, Microsoft have revised their partner programme and lifted the bar.  With our commitment to being the best IT partner we can be, it was vital that we demonstrated this by retaining our ‘Gold’ status.  It was a challenge, but one that we rose to and succeeded, becoming one of very few NZ IT companies to achieve it.

Brent Colbert – Director – Partner Strategy for Microsoft NZ says that “Kinetics are one of the first in NZ to achieve this the Gold Server competency and it demonstrates Kinetics commitment to delivering excellence and best practice.  Kinetics have consistently scored above average in their customer satisfaction surveys reflecting their commitment to delivering the very best experience and business outcomes for their clients”

So, what does it mean?  The new programme specifies a number of ‘competencies’ so that you can be sure of our specific expertise.  It’s still developing and the Small Business Specialist remains off to one-side, as does the cloud services ‘accelerate’ programme – both of which are important to us.  But of the competencies that we see as relevant, we’ve pushed through and achieved Gold in ‘Server’ and Silver in a number of others, 

We’ll be working to achieve a second Gold certification over the coming weeks.  The standard is quite a lot higher, with one standout feature being that we must have more engineers certified, and if we have an engineer certified in one competency, they can’t be certified for a second competency.  This means we can only ever realistically achieve a couple of Gold competencies unless we double or triple in size, sand while we plan to grow, we don’t expect to grow by that much quickly!

Another requirement is customer satisfaction.  To my mind, this is the most important, it’s where the rubber hits the road.  All the training, certification, and experience counts for nothing unless we do a great job for our clients.  If we’re not doing a great job, then we don’t deserve your trust and we don’t deserve your business.   We’re passionate about this and it shows.   We just surveyed a random sample of our clients, covering roughly 30% of our total client base, and we were humbled by the feedback.  It was consistently high, and well ahead of the average of other Gold Partners  other NZ partners and other Small Business Partners – the three benchmarks available to us for comparison.  There is of course room for improvement, and we are grateful for the comments shared by our customers – there were a couple of themes and we are already developing mechanisms to address those so that we can do an even better job.