Earlier this year Kroll Ontrack, a provider of data recovery, information management and legal technologies products and services, launched its Ontrack Online Partner Portal for its data recovery service partners in Canada.
The portal will allow Kroll partners to register, manage and complete projects in a centralized portal utilizing a single interface, and replaces what was a very paper-intensive process said John Riddell, manager of Kroll Ontrack Canada. Kroll’s partners range from reseller service partners and private consultants to retail stories ranging from one-person shops to Best Buy’s Geek Squad, which was a beta tester of the new portal.
The service provider will still take in the customer hard drive and ship it to Kroll’s Toronto lab, where the recovery work is done before returning recovered data to the customer. While there won’t be a major change for customer, before the portal Riddell said partners had to phone a call centre, explain the job to a sales representative, and then receive paperwork via fax that had to be shipped with the drive.
“Now, within a couple of minutes on the portal they have everything they need without a 15 minute phone call and faxes,” said Riddell. “The interface also has opportunities for dealers to give information that couldn’t be communicated before. They can go back and make edits to information, and send questions back and forth during the recovery process, such as what data they really want recovered.”
The portal will allow dealers to track the progress of recovery jobs they’ve submitted so they can update customers, and also includes customizable training and education tools to help partners “learn the lingo” and how to sell data recovery solutions.