Welcome!

Dear Customers, IT Professionals and Partners,

Welcome to the PCIQ blog! I want this to become a home for informal news and discussion around our business. I will try and blog regularly and also encourage PCIQ team members to contribute news about what we are doing, new features, offers, etc… But, to get going, I thought I would explain a little about the origins and background to PCIQ – why I started the business and what we are working to achieve...

The original idea came out of some work we were doing providing a niche technology service to a range of businesses of all sizes. With a background in the provision of IT services (I spent 4 years working as a Systems Engineer at IBM following graduation with a degree in Electronic Engineering) I realised that some of our SME customers needed better all-round technology support. Indeed, not only just at work since there was already starting to be a blurring between office and home “IT” with home broadband connections and home PCs regularly used to access work email (we are talking about 3 years ago). In addition, the continued growth in home working, with professionals relying on IT to do their jobs but not having an in-house IT department to be able to call on, led us to believe there was significant potential in this.

We started looking into the opportunity further and commissioned some work from London Business School to look at the home market potential in more detail. Needless to say, the results were very encouraging…

Another factor which further encouraged us was that we read that a major UK retailer also saw the opportunity for this kind of business. John Clare, who was Chief Executive of Dixons Stores Group said in an interview in the Financial Times:

“Technology is the circuitry of modern day life and has become as important a utility as water, electricity and gas. Domestic technical support rapidly will become as commonplace, if not more so, as visits from plumbers and electricians”. 

Mr Clare went on to say he estimated this was a £1billion business and expected the market to double over the next 5 years. The full article is available here: 

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/a841b030-3c03-11db-9c97-0000779e2340.html 

But we wanted to find a new way of delivering the kind of service customers needed. My experience in creating and managing internet businesses both for large companies and as VC-backed start-ups, drove me towards a pure-play internet model (I had worked on some of the first internet businesses in the UK, having run Rupert Murdoch’s web-design studio and built the first Times newspaper and Sky News websites as well as founding Confetti, one of the success stories of the dot com era in the UK)…

I was convinced we could use the power of a Web 2.0 model to connect customers to IT professionals with the right skills to solve their problem, quickly and easily. What’s more, I knew customers would provide ratings and reviews of jobs they had done – and that this great content would help other customers choose the right IT professional for them.

The final fortuitous event was that we were presented with an opportunity to acquire a brand and a database of IT professionals which promised to give us a massive head-start.

www.PCIQ.com was born in September 2006 with a full launch in November 2007. Our goal now is to provide the very best technology support and repair service to our customers, both home users and small businesses, by leveraging the combined skills of our network of independent, local IT professionals.

We are developing the business rapidly, with enhancements coming along all the time. We strive to deliver the very best quality in everything that we do and so we welcome feedback and suggestions concerning our service, our website, or anything else that will help to become even better – please do let us have your views here or by email to feedback@pciq.com. I hope you find PCIQ useful, and if so, please do tell you friends and colleagues about us!