According to President Jerry Koutavas in the latest My TechDecisions Podcast, The ASCII Group was founded in 1984, back when it wasn’t cool to be a nerd.
“It’s evolved over time but you’re talking about when nerds were not cool. Now they’re very cool,” says Koutavas. “In the ‘80s a lot of these companies were well versed with setting up networks and evolving their business a lot further to what businesses are doing today, in terms of cyber security and everything in between. From an ASCII perspective, we are a community. Our goal is to help IT providers be as efficient and market-ready as possible so they can serve the end user community from a variety of different capacities.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s a local school that’s looking to get a network installed or additional security coverage for their particular environment or the small business on the corner looking to get their website up and point-of-sale systems in place – it covers the gamut. It’s been a great community to work with and we’ve seen a lot of success within the membership and how they work with the end user.”
Community is the operative word. The ASCII Group doesn’t just function as a group of IT providers. It is a resource for them as well, as explained on the organization’s website:
Let’s say your client opens new offices in Detroit and Seattle and they want you to do the IT work. How much time would it take for you to fly out and do the work yourself, or find someone to do the work for you? ASCII takes away the headache. You let us know where you need someone, how many hours it takes, any skills required, and ASCII will contact our members in that area and have them directly contact you. We remove ourselves after that so you decide who you want to work with, what the fee arrangement will be, etc.
Clearly the labor benefit is a gigantic advantage, but resources also come in the form of ongoing education. The ASCII Group holds multiple summits each year across North America. Here, group members meet face-to-face and share ideas and information.
“Some of it is technical. Some of it is business strategy related – how to best serve customers, how to communicate with them, what have you,” says Koutavas. “We saved our members a good bit of money on a particular product, and they’re talking about strategies of rolling it out. Our members are talking about best strategies on training their customers on this system. A lot of these conversations are taking place and what’s surfacing up is ultimately a better way to serve the customer.”
That’s something that The ASCII Group really stresses. The benefits for marketing, ongoing education, resource sharing, and more are great for IT providers. The ultimate goal of them, though, is to better serve the customer. A successful IT provider is going to be an IT provider that achieves the best customer satisfaction. So the ultimate goal of The ASCII Group must be to provide IT providers with whatever they need to best serve customers.
“When it comes down to it, you have highly technical people that are analyzing and researching and testing and making sure these services and solutions are working for their customers,” says Koutavas. “By us working together with our community we are helping each other out. We are making sure that we not only understand the best solutions that we can provide to our end user, we already know the current or ongoing issues with the technologies that we have to deal with. Within the community itself we are filtering out the best solutions available to us that we can offer end users, while getting information from across the country about what is working and not working.”
You can learn more about The ASCII Group and how members of its community can better assist end users customers by listening to the latest episode of My TechDecisions Podcast with Jerry Koutavas.
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