IT support has become a crucial component for most organizations. Without high quality IT support, businesses risk a decrease in customer satisfaction, lower productivity, and they see those impacts in their 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.
In this piece, we look at five ways that IT support providers can let down their clients and the impact that this has on businesses.
Their communication skills are lacking
The world of IT is often stereotyped as a sector that focuses on technological outcomes; where top-notch customer service is an unimportant sideline concern. 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 in helping your staff understand current or upcoming improvements. A quality IT support provider brings a personal touch and a customer-first approach.
Your IT Provider should 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 best outcomes for your business.
On the other hand, a provider that may not be the strategic IT partner your company needs, is one that likes to keep silent until they’re needed, only communicates in convoluted jargon, and never offer suggestions on their own that can drive value for your business.
The service standard is determined by service level agreements
Wait, shouldn’t this be great news? An IT company that meets its commitments sounds ideal, right? However, a key difference between a quality IT support provider and a sub-optimal one, is that the quality provider will consider their SLA with your business to be a minimum bar for excellent: the SLA is the floor, not the roof for the value that they can provide.
This also relates to the point on communication and service; a provider that focuses on meeting SLAs and little else, is more likely to see its relationship with its clients as a burdening obligation, rather than as an opportunity to channel their passion into exceptional value for these clients.
Not only this, some forms of value are intangible and will likely exist outside of the SLA. For instance, your IT support provider should be extremely technically knowledgeable and should be able to describe changes and actions in order to articulate 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 should question if the price you are paying is reasonable, and if you’re working with the best provider that you could be right now.
Your network is being crippled by recurring problems.
A key crux of IT support includes remote supervision and maintenance that keeps your IT infrastructure secure and running smoothly. 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. This will have the effect of keeping your IT systems running smoothly and free from the impact of cyber threats.
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 which could be at the root cause.
Too many promises
A key reason why businesses outsource their IT, is to gain a broad range of knowledge and experience that otherwise would be too costly to create internally.
Having a IT support provider with a broad range of abilities and specializations is undoubtedly very advantageous, but it’s also a good idea to be wary of providers that assert that they can “do it all,” especially if they have a very small team. These kinds of promises can lead to a great range of misunderstandings, issues, and unfulfillment of false promises that can come to feel like a stifling constraint to the client.
You can verify IT support providers’ credentials and specialisms by asking about accreditations, vendor relationships, and case study samples. Without a well-resourced, skilled and large enough team of experts, maintaining technical competency in every imaginable area in the large, complicated world of business technology can be a difficult task and lead to all kinds of upsets for clients who cannot benefit from these competencies as they had hoped for.
Conversations are overly centered on products
A key measure of the quality of an IT support provider is how much they tailor their services and implementations to your needs. Astute IT service providers will 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 opposite strategy. They frequently begin a discussion by making a pitch for a service or product they are attempting to sell, promoting services that may not be precisely aligned with their clients’ infrastructure, nor their broader organizational needs and constraints.
Your IT provider should have taken the time to learn about how you conduct business, any commercial or regulatory pressures you may be under, the 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. If your provider has not shown much interest in your company, there’s a good chance that they are serving poorly as a strategic technology partner.
We hope this article has been useful for showcasing some of the critical ingredients of a great IT support service, what the opposite of this looks like, and how it can impact businesses. With this information, you can assess how high-quality your provider’s service is, and use these factors when deciding on your next provider of IT support.
Centarus: A Leading IT Support Provider
At Centarus, we specialize in tailoring our services to cater to the unique requirements of businesses in San Francisco and the broader Bay Area. Whether your business operates within the city limits or spans multiple locations across the Bay Area or even reaches across the nation or around the world, Centarus is your trusted partner for implementing the ideal IT solutions.
Our expertise is designed to help you cut costs, optimize your workflows, and enhance productivity. Our team of professionals is dedicated to ensuring that your IT environment in San Francisco and the Bay Area is not only highly secure today but also well-prepared for a secure future. Get in touch today; we’re here to support your IT needs.
