How our pod structure contributed to a 99.80% customer service score and a national Australian Achiever Award win.
When Step Fwd IT was named the 2026 Australian Achiever Award National Winner for Information & Communications Technology Services, we were incredibly proud.
As rewarding as the achievement was, we were most interested in the feedback behind it.
The Australian Achiever Awards are based on independent customer feedback, and our clients consistently highlighted strong communication, dedicated contacts, understanding of their organisation, proactive support and long-term relationships. The feedback reinforced something we have believed for many years: great IT support requires more than technical capability. It requires an understanding of the organisation behind the technology.
That belief has shaped how Step Fwd IT delivers managed IT services and ultimately led to our pod structure.
Technology challenges rarely exist in isolation.
Every support request, project, cybersecurity initiative or technology investment exists within a broader business context. Organisational goals, internal processes, budgets, risk tolerance and future plans all influence the right outcome. The more an IT partner understands those factors, the more valuable their advice and support become.
Yet many organisations experience IT support as a series of disconnected transactions.
In a traditional managed services model, a ticket is logged and assigned to an engineer. If additional expertise is required, the issue is escalated to another team. This approach isn't inherently wrong, and it can be an effective way to organise technical resources. The challenge is that each handover can lead to lost context, repeated conversations and reduced ownership.
Many business leaders have experienced the frustration of explaining the same issue multiple times, only to find themselves speaking with a different person at each stage of the process. Over time, that can make the relationship feel focused on tickets rather than outcomes.
This was never the type of experience we wanted to create for our clients.
“We've never believed great IT support comes from having the biggest service desk or the most engineers. It comes from understanding the people, processes and goals behind the technology. The pod structure was designed to protect that understanding as we grow.”
Chris Mannering, Director of Step Fwd IT
From the beginning, we believed that technical knowledge was only part of delivering great IT support. To provide meaningful advice, our team also needed to understand how our clients operate, what matters to them and where they are headed.
That philosophy sits at the heart of our purpose: Support from a Place of Complete Understanding.
To make that possible, we assign every client to a dedicated pod rather than placing them in a general support queue. Each pod consists of a small team that works closely together and builds familiarity with the client's environment, people, business priorities and preferred ways of working.
That shared knowledge means support conversations begin with context already in place. Our team can spend less time establishing background and more time resolving issues, identifying improvements and providing advice relevant to the organisation.
As technology environments become more complex, specialist expertise will always be required. Escalations are a normal and important part of delivering effective IT support.
The difference lies in how those escalations are managed.
In many support models, an escalation can feel like a handover. Responsibility moves from one person to another as the issue progresses through different technical teams. While technical expertise may increase, organisational context can get diluted along the way.
Within a pod, expertise is added without losing context.
Additional engineers may get involved in resolving an issue, but they already work from a shared understanding of the client's systems, priorities and environment. Knowledge is shared across the pod, ensuring clients are not reliant on a single individual, while accountability remains clear throughout the process.
At Step Fwd IT, we believe the engineer who takes the call should own the outcome. Additional expertise can be brought into the conversation whenever required, but responsibility does not disappear as the issue moves forward.
This gives clients access to the expertise they need without sacrificing the continuity and accountability that comes from working with a team already familiar with their organisation. Clients benefit from broader technical expertise while maintaining the continuity that comes from working with a team that already understands their organisation.
Working with the same team over time creates familiarity that goes beyond documenting systems and configurations. Our engineers become familiar with operational requirements, previous decisions, recurring challenges and the people who rely on the technology every day.
That context helps make support more efficient, but its value extends beyond resolving issues. It also leads to more informed conversations about improvements, risks and future technology decisions because recommendations are being made with a broader understanding of the organisation.
This is an important part of what we mean by Partnerships Beyond Technology. Our role is not simply to manage technology, but to understand where it fits within the organisation and provide advice accordingly.
The Australian Achiever Awards measure customer experiences, which is why achieving a 99.80% customer service score was particularly meaningful to us.
We never introduced the pod structure simply to give Step Fwd IT a point of difference. It was designed to create greater continuity, clearer accountability and stronger relationships between our team and the organisations we support.
Independent feedback from the Australian Achiever Awards gives us confidence that clients are experiencing the benefits the model was designed to provide.
Technology will continue to evolve, bringing new opportunities, risks and challenges for the organisations we support. Our approach is to ensure that as technology changes, the context behind decisions is never lost.
That is what Support from a Place of Complete Understanding means to us. It shapes how we structure our teams, how we approach support and how we build long-term partnerships with our clients.
Winning the Australian Achiever Award is something our team is incredibly proud of. More importantly, the independent feedback behind the award has reinforced our belief that how we deliver IT support matters as much as the technology itself.
For Step Fwd IT, our pod structure is key to delivering that experience consistently as we continue to grow.
