What should you look for in an IT services company?

Reflecting on the UK IT Industry Awards through Zen Internet's success

Zen Internet walked away with the 2015 UK IT Industry Award for Best Services Company of the Year, but why? Here's a handy guide to show what great service embodies, in direct accordance with our judging criteria.

Professionalism

The IT services sector is a crowded market generating a lot of noise with many players shouting about how they are different from the rest of the pack. But too often, it's all sound and fury.

Zen likes to think it operates outside this environment and one of its chief differentiators is the company's commitment to telling its customers the truth - a refreshing, open and honest approach to business.

Martin O'Donnell, Managing Director of Zen's Corporate and Mid-Market division, told Computing: "Our customers' business goals are directly driving their IT decisions - which is why we see it as our role to fully understand how the services that we offer can help them achieve their strategic objectives.

"We're happy to talk about technologies customers could adopt, trends in the industry and even products that aren't necessarily things we offer right now. We share our knowledge as well as technology and service roadmaps so that customers have insight into the areas of focus for Zen over the coming years."

Innovation

As well as increasing its scope as an IT services company next to its status as a consumer and enterprise-grade ISP, Zen's Corporate and Mid-Market division is setting out its stall as an infrastructure firm - launching managed cloud services, Zen Cloud and Amazon Web Services as well as a Cloud Communications service, which is hosted across Zen's high-performance WAN services.

Role Model

Zen was 20 years old in 2015, and for the first ten years its core focus was as an ISP. But as O'Donnell explains, it was more customer demand rather than flat-out financial ambition that led to its eventual expansion into the Corporate and Mid-Market sector.

"Because of the quality of the service Zen delivered, IT professionals who were using Zen at home started to ask for business-grade services. Ultimately it was driven by Zen's reliable and robust service. Moreover, if any problems arose customers could talk to someone on an intelligent basis about their technical problems," says O'Donnell.

"That's how our corporate division grew. It was as much customer-driven as driven by us."

Measurable Success

Zen serves a diverse range of customers - from households across the nation to more than 24,000 small businesses, as well as the Corporate and Mid-Market sector. It provides critical IT services for the likes of the Yearsley Group, Booths and National Tyres, to name just a few.

Zen has proven that it can more than hold its own against the bigger service providers, and can do so while turning over more than £54m per year. Zen does this by inspiring loyalty in a customer base that - as mentioned previously - largely decided on its own that it wanted to deal with Zen on an enterprise level.

With a business development team that don't even draw commission from sales, Zen believes happy employees make happy customers and while anybody can say that, it seems to have been borne out of a long, successful life of organic growth and - of course - a UK IT Industry Award to back that up.

Congratulations to Zen Internet.

Entries for 2016's UK IT Industry Awards are now open.

This year's awards will take place on Wednesday 16 November at the Battersea Park Events Arena in London. With over 1,300 guests in attendance, the awards bring together the industry's leading players for the biggest night of the year.

Enter now and join the ranks of the IT industry's elite award winners, like Zen Internet.