The Company

With offices in Greenville and New Bern, N.C., Computer Geeks has been delivering customized IT and security services for small and medium businesses (SMB) since 1995. Through its new Geeks Help Desk service, the company has moved from a reactive to proactive approach using managed security services.

“Today, managed security services account for more than 40% of our business, which has enabled us to be much more proactive with our customers, and at the same time be profitable,” explains Service Manager Bill Doane. “You can say we have moved from fighting fires to preventing them as we can now plan, deliver, and bill for services much more efficiently.”

The Challenge

For Bill, preventing SMB cyberattacks and educating businesses about security best practices are top priorities. The team has started offering free cybersecurity classes to help new clients understand why specific security services are needed.

“With new clients, the challenges we constantly face are preventing ransomware and keeping data backed up. Education is a big part of this,” he says. “Some small businesses believe they are protected with a free antivirus solution or assume that USB drives are always going to keep their data safe, and that’s not the case. SMBs must put a higher level of protection in place. Our job is not only to help them understand this but also to provide the best solution for their budget.”

The Solution

An AVG-Avast partner since 2013, Computer Geeks has been using Avast Business CloudCare for the past four years. Says Bill, “We really needed a good central portal that anyone on our team could access to monitor and manage services for customers. We looked at antivirus from other providers, including McAfee, but we didn’t find the centralized management that CloudCare offered.”

The team is selling CloudCare’s Antivirus Pro Plus, Content Filtering, and Encrypted Email services. “We like CloudCare because it provides a blend of everything. We can easily bundle services like the antivirus and content filtering and provide it through our Geeks Help Desk and add services as needs or budgets change. We also take advantage of the free remote control tool,” Bill adds.

After a thorough evaluation, Computer Geeks recently added CloudCare Cloud Backup to its service package. Explains Jason Pyatt, backup manager, “We started using the Cloud Backup service because we can deploy it from the CloudCare platform. We like the fact that you can schedule and manage backups, and quickly restore folders and data.”

Says Jason, “Using the reporting capabilities, I can generate monthly backup reports and show customers what was done and how much data was backed up. We can also analyze the reports to see if the volume of data being backed up should be adjusted. All of this helps us market our service package to SMBs because we can say we provide a great data backup service built right into their antivirus.”

The Results

CloudCare has helped Computer Geeks build its customer base, upsell services, and maintain high customer retention rates. “CloudCare is critical to our ability to deliver managed security,” says Bill. “We can easily identify the security services needed and deliver a scalable package with pricing that we can quickly adjust for any size or type of business.”

In the past 18 months, Computer Geeks has increased its service contracts for managed security by 70% and achieved 95% customer retention. Bill estimates his team has upsold 40% of its existing customer base on new CloudCare services packaged through its Geeks Help Desk service.  With CloudCare’s range of services, the team has been able to consolidate and reduce the number of solutions in its services portfolio.

Bill also credits the strong relationship with the Avast Business team for the company’s success. “Our partnership with Avast Business is one of the best vendor relationships that we have had. We are a smaller customer for many vendors, but the Avast Business team treats us very well, are always very responsive, and are focused on helping us secure our clients and grow our business.”

Is it time to put Avast Business CloudCare to work for your clients and your bottom line? Get started today by downloading a free trial of CloudCare.