DMG World Media

Martin Hull, IT Manager

As part of the Daily Mail & General Trust plc, DMG World Media publishes one of the largest ranges of business magazines in the world. Thirty publications are produced at the Surrey-based division and clients include 3M (the cassette tape, stationery and metal giants) and paintmakers Polymers Colour. The magazines are used as selling vehicles for manufacturers, wholesalers, suppliers, and also cover industry news. In some cases, DMG produces exhibitions along with magazines like the Electrical Retail magazine and the Electrical Retailing Show.

There are around two hundred people working at the Redhill offices where we met Martin Hull, the IT Manager. He explained that they have a mixed platform of PCs and Apple Macintoshes that are on the same network and interact with each other. SupportPlan supports all the Macintosh systems.

SupportPlan & DMG

DMG have been with SupportPlan for two years. Along with the Redhill division, SupportPlan also supports the Harrow site that produces the Ski Show, the Ideal Home Exhibition and the related publications. At Redhill, Martin Hull has an in-house IT team of seven but still requires the expertise of SupportPlan’s dedicated engineers. DMG enjoys the benefits of SupportPlan’s Pay As You Go deal. This means that they buy a number of points each month and these points can be used for despatching an engineer for on site help to resolve problems, or to install new software/hardware. Telephone support is also included.

Martin goes on to explain why he rates SupportPlan’s services. “Whenever we’ve asked them to send an engineer in, we’ve always been pleased with the results because their engineers are very knowledgeable, experienced and reliable.” He continues, “They’re also very good at customer facing. Many of the support companies we’ve used in the past would send along an engineer who may know an awful lot about the inside of a PC but knows nothing whatsoever about how to talk to the user or to myself.”

SupportPlan Provides Solutions

SupportPlan recently resolved one of Martin’s issues over the phone, saving him time and money. “A Macintosh was unable to print and I tried everything I knew but wasn’t getting anywhere so I phoned SupportPlan for an engineer to come in. They said that they could send an engineer but it would come off our points. Alternatively there were half a dozen ideas that might work if I wanted to try them and it wouldn’t cost me anything – so we went for that!” Martin concluded, “This is just one example that proves to me that SupportPlan is a company that really takes pride in their customer relationships and they go to great lengths to retain and enrich these over the years.”

Martin has found that the SupportPlan team is happy to pass on knowledge to customers. “One of my support team, who manages the Macs for the company, has greatly expanded his knowledge almost entirely from sitting with SupportPlans engineers when they’ve been on site and explained their procedures to him as they’ve worked.”

A final example involves a couple of troublesome printers that Martin had initially asked their other support company to look at. “They couldn’t do anything with them apart from picking them up and taking them back to the manufacturers, which would have meant being without printers for six weeks. An engineer from SupportPlan came down, took them apart and within two hours he’d fixed both of them! That’s the sort of thing we’ve come to expect from SupportPlan.” Martin concluded, “We’ve just rolled over into the new contract with SupportPlan and we’re quite happy to let it roll. I wouldn’t even consider another company for doing the kind of support work that they provide.”