Percept IS - History

History

Perceptis was founded in Cleveland in 2004 to provide IT support and help desk services to higher education institutions. In discussions with university CIOs, particularly Lev Gonick of Case Western Reserve University (Case), CIOs were searching for new ways to deliver IT/help desk support. Current methods involved offering it as part of the institution’s own service offering, although many CIOs were realizing that was not part of their core competencies. Other service delivery methods involved outsourcing these services to overseas IT help desk providers. At Case, according to Gonick, the goal was to create a call center that would be capable of providing call center/help desk services competitive with any third-party organization. Gonick described the business idea on his Blog Bytes From Lev. In it he said:

"Our goal from the outset was to create an organization with core competencies in this customer-facing arena and turn a context-services into a core services of a for-profit organization to service the broad education sector. We also wanted to leverage the growing availability of unified messaging services and encouraged the new company to become the Jet Blue of call center technologies offering home-based, multi-lingual services homing, wherever possible back to Cleveland. We also wanted to encourage the development of a call center technology platform which would enable real time customer relationship management starting with proactive knowledge through our online directory services of the customer as they called, IM’d, or submitted on-line request for services."