How to get the most out of your IT support services provider

Outsourcing your IT support services makes sense for a lot of reasons, but unless you explore your options and optimise your relationship you could lose out.

Using an IT support services provider is a great way to access expertise without having to invest in employing staff yourself.

Done well, IT support services can really take a lot of pain away from your business. But done wrong, it can actually add to your stress.

Go onto the website off most companies offering IT support services and you will see that, in general, they make the same promises in terms of technical know-how and service, predominantly disaster recovery, hardware installation and support, software expertise, remote monitoring etc. The things you need, and…. well, expect.

So how do you choose a company and then make sure it actually makes life easier for you?

Firstly, discuss your needs with them and see how forthcoming they are about setting SLAs in place and how happy they are to accommodate your individual needs. Will you get one point of contact? What happens if this point of contact isn’t available?

Secondly, investigate what level of support you need. If you don’t have an IT department you will be relying on your provider to essentially be your IT team so your relationship will need to be close, communicative and efficient. How will this work? Will all your employees be able to contact them to raise a problem if they need to? Can they guarantee a response time? Can they come onsite regularly to build relations with your team? Will they be proactive in monitoring performance and troubleshooting problems, or will they just sit around and wait for you to contact them?

If you do have some IT staff, what problems will they need to escalate and will your provider be able to cope with this in the time and manner you expect?

Make it clear that failing to meet SLAs will have consequences for them.

Having a contract with SLAs in place with your IT support services provider can guarantee that instead of spending time chasing support tickets, fielding questions from unhappy staff and generally worrying about when problems will be fixed, you can get on with your work while someone solves the problems for you.