Google partner Promevo helps customers move to the cloud by sharing its own Chrome Enterprise and G Suite story

Editor’s note: Today’s post is by Aaron Gumz, Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Promevo, one of the largest Premier G Suite, Google Cloud Platform, and Chrome Enterprise resellers in North America. Promevo, based in Burlington, Kentucky, has three offices, and uses Chrome Enterprise, G Suite, Google Cloud Platform, and Hangouts Meet hardware to run every aspect of the business.

We’re a small organization, with 50 employees that work with companies of all sizes. That used to mean a lot of time-consuming and expensive business travel, and major upkeep of computers to keep people productive. In our startup days, we used to spend thousands of dollars to restore data every time a Windows desktop or laptop hard drive failed. We were previously standardized on Windows Exchange Servers that needed constant maintenance. At any company, device failures are a major event, costing money as well as employee down time.

Once we went all-in on Google Cloud, we were able to cut down on travel, minimize IT maintenance, and scale our small business so we could operate like a large one. That’s why we speak from experience when we tell customers about the value of Google Cloud. We’re in the perfect position to solve customer problems like helping remote employees work together, moving away from legacy systems, and reducing IT headaches.

Promevo uses every Chrome Enterprise and G Suite: from Chromebooks, Google Docs, and Google Drive in offices and on the road, to Hangouts Meet hardware to stay in touch with sales teams, and Google Cloud Platform to build new apps. We like to say that we don’t just talk about use cases—we live them. Our competitors may have more employees, yet enterprise customers like Uber, Mailchimp, and Shopify constantly want to work with us.

Because we are a certified Premier Google Partner and use Google Cloud tools all day, we know what works for businesses of every size and in every industry. Every quarter we rotate out our employees’ Chrome devices so they can test all screen sizes and features. We use their feedback when we suggest Chromebook and Chromebox models to customers based on their budgets and five-year plans.

Since we are a Chrome-first business, we advise customers that Chrome OS is the foundation for their cloud journey, especially with virtual desktop tools like Citrix added in. Many customers want to move beyond on-premise software and high-maintenance hardware, even though they rely on legacy applications. For example, we helped a new hospital customer adopt Chromebase desktop computers with Citrix so employees can access clinical applications, while benefiting from cloud flexibility.

A big frustration for our customers is connecting employees to each other, and to customers. With three offices, we can relate. We have Hangouts Meet hardware in every conference room, which helps us meet with sales prospects to have real conversations. It’s more cost-effective than sending salespeople out on the road. For internal meetings, Hangouts Meet makes us feel like a unified team in a way that phone calls and emails can’t do—for example, while in a Meet meeting, we use a shared Google Doc to take notes while we talk and use Jamboard to bring our ideas to life.

We also use Hangouts Meet for customer support. Instead of sending emails back and forth, customers can see and hear us talking through their challenges in real time. Once we started using Hangouts Meet for support, our customer satisfaction ratings improved significantly; today, 80 percent of our customers say they’re happy with our services overall.

When our customers struggle to maintain workplace devices, we share our story. Switching to G Suite, Chromebooks, and Chromeboxes saved not only repair costs, but helped us reduce our dependence on internal IT services. Our IT team, which used to help us recover from hard-drive disasters, can now focus solely on assisting our customers.

For customers that need productivity solutions to grow their businesses, we advise them to do what we did: build the tools in-house on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). We can quickly spin up apps to solve our business problems. We created a purchasing system that makes it easy for our customers to buy products online, and a sales intelligence tool to continue to improve our customer relationship management systems.

Every day, we find ways to use Chrome devices, G Suite and Hangouts Meet to work smarter instead of harder—and to help our business operate like a large enterprise. These tools fueled our own growth, so when customers ask us to help them move to the cloud, we’re their best example of success.