Logres clients are used to meeting their own consultant on site once or several times a month. In corona times, of course, this is different... How is contact with the consultant now?

Sven de Keijser is an SAP Business One consultant at Logres and has been working mainly from home for the past two months. He has contact with customers through Microsoft Teams.

You would say that as a remote consultant, Sven would not make progress as easily as if he could be physically present with clients. But nothing could be further from the truth. Sven: 'There are no projects that are slowed down by this type of consultancy. On the contrary, my experience is that implementation projects sometimes run even faster than usual.'

To-the-point

An important difference from the time before the corona crisis is that Sven has much less travel time. That already makes a considerable difference in a day. But according to Sven, meetings via Teams also often run faster and more effectively than physical meetings.

'There is less time for smalltalk: we get to the point faster. Moreover, meetings are often shorter. Better to have brief contact a few times a day than to sit around the table for an hour and a half.'

Of course it took some switching, but Sven is used to video conferencing. 'I worked for Logres at a company that made a videocall program. We used that a lot ourselves. So video calling is now in my system. But also customers are getting used to it now, I notice.'

Remote control

Through Microsoft Teams, Sven can do anything he would normally do if he were physically present at a client's office. 'I can share my screen to explain things. The customer can share his screen with me if he has questions. And it's even possible to take over someone else's computer through Teams. That's especially nice for our developers and support department.'

Sven not only attends meetings through Teams, he also regularly conducts SAP Business One training through this program.

'Usually with about ten people. I tell a few things and regularly share my screen. Of course, you have to make arrangements in advance: if there are so many people in a training session, it is handy if everyone who is not speaking turns off their sound, otherwise the background noise will drive you crazy.'

Sven also often uses the chat functionality during training sessions for questions and comments.

Coffee Break

Isn't Sven getting tired of video calling? 'Not yet. I think I spend about 50% of my working day in conversation. If I'm giving a training session, I'm obviously longer, but with a few breaks in between.

You can't keep talking for 3 hours and expect your listeners to stay there the whole time. A coffee break in due course would be nice. That's what you would do in a physical meeting, right?