June 2017
About Clinic
Clinic is a London-based, full-service creative agency delivering creative solutions to clients for over 30 years. With a team of over 40, they specialise in advertising, design and brand communications for clients within the leisure and entertainment industry, working with the likes of Arsenal FC, Sega, EA, and Barclays.
Challenge
As a design agency, Clinic relies heavily on a Mac-based workforce. Running a Microsoft-based infrastructure, Clinic faced compatibility issues between the two, with particular pain points when accessing mail, syncing calendars and sharing information from Macs to PCs. Guy Hatton, Digital Director, explains the struggles they faced with their existing solution from Microsoft. “For us, using Microsoft on a Mac was just an unpleasant experience. Microsoft didn’t support email on a Mac, we couldn’t synchronise calendars between Mac and PC, and people were generally unhappy with the service.”
“We spent so much time talking about what was wrong and how to fix it. We didn’t want to worry about the ‘how’, we just wanted a solution that would work and that we didn’t need to think about,” said Hatton. “We were at the stage where we had to decide whether to get an in-house exchange server, but we didn’t want to put money into it, there was no value in it for us. The cost of running it, cooling it, for it to just sit in the corner taking up space, it didn’t make sense to us.”
After successfully presenting their case to go Google to the external IT management company that managed their infrastructure, Clinic decided to switch to Google. Switching to Google provided huge productivity benefits to Clinic, especially for team collaboration and communication. For example, Clinic historically had a very linear process from the point of inception to completion of a client presentation, but using Google Docs streamlined this process, with several people collaborating at once.
Google Workspace allowed Clinic to fix the issues they were having with mail and calendar integration across Mac and PC devices. The continuous and seamless experience from one device to another was a huge advantage for Clinic when accessing mail, calendar or documents from different devices. Client presentations could now be created using Google Slides and presented in meetings from any device. To complement this, Clinic also rolled out Chromebooks to encourage a plug-and-play culture, working flexibly and seamlessly from one device to another.
Clinic also started to utilise the sharing capabilities of Google Sheets as a centralised point to schedule work and resourcing, along with using Google Forms for internal training and assessments. Hatton describes the changes they noticed as an agency since switching to Google Workspace.
“You quickly forget the struggles of the past – we haven’t consciously counted how many days we haven’t spent talking about it anymore, we just know we don’t, and that’s when we know the solution is working.”
