In today’s business landscape, IT support has become a crucial component for most organisations. Without the proper support in place, any kind of IT outage could result in a decrease in customer satisfaction, impact your productivity, and affect your bottom-line. Therefore, it is crucial to evaluate the essential qualities of an IT provider to ensure you receive the consistent, high-quality support you deserve.
Their communication skills are lacking
Many people think that since IT focuses on technological outcomes, top-notch customer service is sacrificed. This couldn’t be further from the truth; working with an enthusiastic, friendly IT partner is essential to making sure you get the most out of any new investments and to aiding your staff in understanding current or upcoming improvements.
Your IT Provider must be cooperative, friendly, helpful, and patient. They should act in a way that demonstrates their enthusiasm for their work, and they should be open to interacting with you and your team to ensure that you are happy with the assistance you are receiving. They ought to serve as a consulting presence for your company, readily available to help with both significant and minor issues and eager to advise you towards the greatest goods and services.
Your provider may not be the strategic IT partner your company needs as it navigates substantial changes if they are significantly silent, only communicate in convoluted jargon, and never offer suggestions on their own.
The service standard is determined by service level agreements
But hold on, isn’t that excellent news? Don’t you want an IT company that honours its commitments? A trustworthy IT vendor would undoubtedly seek to deliver considerably higher performance and would consider a service level agreement to be the absolute minimum bar for excellence.
Intangible components won’t be listed in an efficient SLA for IT support. For instance, your provider should be extremely technically knowledgeable and should be able to describe changes and actions in order to quantify their benefits. Any financial or legal restrictions should be known to them, and they should build solutions with these in mind. Additionally, a top-notch IT supplier would place a strong emphasis on service components like proactive network maintenance that might be less constrained by contractual performance obligations.
Although contractual obligations are essential for defining the terms of service provision, if all you receive from your supplier are those obligations, you can question if the price you are paying is reasonable.
Your network is being crippled by recurring problems.
Critical elements of IT support include remote supervision and maintenance. To protect the overall integrity of your environment, your IT provider should handle software/operating system upgrades, network health checks, and remotely applying security fixes. Keeping your environment safe from cyber threats and minimising downtime (a time when a system is unavailable) are the goals of all of this.
If the same issues keep happening to your company’s network or if network outages happen frequently, your provider is obviously skipping preventative maintenance. They might also be putting band-aid remedies before bigger, more complicated problems.
Too many promises
Businesses often outsource their IT to gain a broad range of knowledge and experience that would be prohibitively expensive to build internally. Having a provider with a broad range of abilities and specialisations is undoubtedly very advantageous, but it’s also a good idea to be wary of providers that assert that they “do it all,” especially if they have a very small team. Without a team of experts, maintaining technical competency in every imaginable area in the large, complicated world of business technology is a difficult task. Ask about accreditations, vendor relationships, and even case study samples if your provider makes lofty promises about being able to do anything to find out whether the claims are true.
Conversations are overly centered on products
In the end, technology is not just there for your company to use; it is also there to help it. Knowing this, astute IT service providers begin a conversation with their customers to learn about their needs, limitations, and issues. They then work backward from these business concerns to discover or design solutions that best address these problems.
Unfortunately, some providers opt for the incorrect strategy. They frequently begin a discussion by making a pitch for a service or product they are attempting to sell, promoting ridiculous goods and services that don’t satisfy their customers’ needs.
Your IT provider should have taken the time to learn about how you conduct business, any commercial or regulatory pressures you may be under, any logistical challenges you may be facing, and the team’s working arrangements even though they will never fully comprehend the inner workings of your business. Your provider probably won’t be able to serve as your strategic technology partner if they haven’t shown much interest in your company.
Reviewing your provider’s performance on some of the aforementioned fronts may be necessary to decide if they can be the right fit for your business going forward. Continue reading to learn the five essential qualities you should look for in an IT supplier.
Ready to take your business to the next level?
Contact Bells IT Support, Dartford’s top IT support company for SMEs. We provide a range of IT services, from managed IT to business telephony and project management. Our team takes a proactive approach to each of our managed service offerings, with solutions tailored to your business needs and budget. We are committed to providing strategic solutions to our clients and building business partnerships based on sincerity and trust. Partnering with us means access to expert tech solutions grounded in business reality and a firm commitment to cyber security best practices. Contact us today to learn more.