Attack of the nerds

Peak hour traffic might not seem like the best place to find customers for an IT services organisation, but Nerds On Site think there is nowhere better to build new business contacts.
 
The company’s contractors love traffic because their bright red VW “Nerdmobiles” stick out in it like a sore thumb. And that is why its team will often hit the road at 7.00am and drive out of town so the wave of incoming traffic sees their cars, note the 1800 My Nerds phone number they bear and then hire them to provide IT services.
 
Nerdmobiles are a great gimmick, but they are not the only one you will see in coming months as a new wave of resellers competes for the small business and consumer dollar with marketing tactics that are all but unknown in the channel, and an approach to delivering services that breaks all the rules.
 
And it is SMEs and home computer users that the new wave resellers are targeting, largely because research suggests these markets are yet to be serviced in a style that meets their needs.
 
“The time is right to develop branded services organisations for SMEs,” says Jean Marc Annonier, IDC’s research manager for IT spending, vertical markets and SMEs. “SMEs want trust with their providers,” he says. “But it is important to succeed every time you work with an SME. If you fail they find another provider.”
 
Many organisations that serve SMEs and home users have been burned, he says, and are looking for an organisation they feel is likely to win their trust as they return to the IT market.
 
“The SMEs are right in their attitudes. SMEs would like to go to the big brands and the big brands would like to go to them,” Annonier says.
 
But with large IT services companies largely unwilling to work on smaller scales and smaller resellers often struggling to offer service SMEs appreciate, the market has opened up for a new style of reseller that puts brand before technology and makes customer service a central tenet of their operations.


Meet the Nerds
 
Nerds On Site’s plan of attack starts with the Nerdmobile.
 
“The visibility the Nerdmobile gives you is great,” says Nerds On Site’s 'Pod Leader' Jay Carter (a Pod Leader is akin to a regional manager). “A lot of people see it and it wins a lot of business.”
 
The cars and the approach they lead are also useful symbols of just how different Nerds On Site is compared to a traditional reseller.
 
The Canadian company does not expect its staff will hold industry certifications and is proudly technology-neutral: it has no formal relationships with vendors or even distributors.
 
The company is even happy to make a hardware or software recommendation to its clients and have them buy the goods themselves, as it is uninterested in taking margin and would prefer to avoid the cash flow complications that come with equipment or licence resales.
 
This stance means the company can recommend and implement vendors’ products without ever coming into contact with them. But instead of trading on its vendor affiliations and using them as an indicator of quality, Nerds On Site sets out to create a customer service experience it believes other organisations almost never consider.
 
Nice Nerds
 
“The key criterion for becoming a Nerd is personality,” says Carter. The company’s selection process therefore sees it favour people with good personal skills over those with technical skills. “You can be self-taught,” Carter says. “It’s about ability, not qualifications,” and the company has a line about offering “human engineers” not computer engineers.
 
The combination of brand and customer service is intended to appeal to those who do not know where to turn for computer services, distrust a local white-box reseller or have been dissatisfied with previous experiences working with a smaller reseller. “A lot of our customers say they have been burned one time too many by one-man shops,” Carter says. "They want someone they can trust."
 
Many of those customers are small businesses seeking either break-fix services or ongoing support. Others are home users who more often that not have been infected by spyware and simply do not know what to do about it.
 
But Nerds On Site asserts it is capable of scaling up to tackle even an ERP implementation for a small business by tapping into the collective skills and experience of Nerds in Australian and beyond.
 
And whatever the task, Carter feels the combination of branded cars, friendly people, red polo shirts, a network of consultants who cover for each other and a central 1800 number for support creates trust.
 
“Lots of one-man shops are very technical,” Carter says. “When they charge $200 for 15 minutes’ work it can feel like a rip-off. We speak in plain English,” and whenever possible try to educate users so they can fix minor problems for themselves in future.