Future Bound IT provides UK based AbacusNext Partner support for Deep Blue Costs

https://www.deepbluecosts.com/

Deep Blue Costs is a cost law firm who have been established since 2015 and are driven by an experienced team of consultants and led by director Mark Carlisle who has over 40 years of costs law experience. Like ourselves, they aim to provide excellent service and results to their clients.

As a consultancy, we support and provide Amicus Attorney practice management solutions and AbacusNext Private Cloud which operates not only as a secure environment for practice management software but as an IaaS service for the legal and financial sectors. We are currently the only UK based consultancy who work closely with AbacusNext delivering and supporting their solutions on a regional and national basis.

We were approached by Deep Blue Costs in October of 2017 as the firm has been users of Amicus Attorney Practice Management software for many years. Like many other firms in their sector, the company had decided to move to a private cloud environment provided by  AbacusNext.

Deep Blue Costs were looking for additional support for their software and environment within UK business hours having found that it had been difficult to contact engineering teams in the US when needed and were also keen to establish a point of contact and escalation that would be available to assist with day to day and evening issues.  AbacusNext provide 24/7 support services for their customers but with over 200,000 firms to assist also felt a UK Based consultancy could provide the additional support required.

After discussion of some of the issues faced by Deep Blue Costs with director Mark Carlisle and  AbacusNext we decided it was important to provide not only technical support and escalation for the firm but that service levels would need to be drastically improved and relationships developed to ensure fast resolution of issues and to maintain solid and robust engagement between all organisations and teams involved.

The biggest challenge faced by all parties was distance. With AbacusNext being headquartered in San Diego and the Amicus Attorney support team being based in Toronto we felt it essential to provide a support service that would act as one point of contact for our mutual customer while remaining flexible enough to adapt to drastically different business hours and provide the support required.

We initially ran a trial support contract to allow Deep Blue Costs to assess our services and capabilities, providing technical account management, software support and ticket assessment and escalation in standard business hours with extended availability until late evening to allow for collaboration with Abacus Next engineering teams and resolution of issues when required.

At the beginning of 2018, Deep Blue Costs trial period came to an end and after a brief discussion with our customer, we were pleased to hear they were delighted with our support services but wanted to move to a case by case support model. We currently provide an hourly rate service to Deep Blue Costs that scales up and down with the business and offers the same support hours as before.

Working with Deep Blue Costs and closely with our partner AbacusNext has allowed us to develop and nurture working relationships and gain a better understanding of some of the trials, tribulations and pains of IT in the legal sector whilst taking pride in delivering a level of service we would expect to receive ourselves.