Know What You Want When You Outsource Support

Lots of our customers are small businesses that have outsourced IT support to one of the many companies which exist, today, to do just that. Often, we become involved because their IT isn’t working for them in some way, and when we analyse the situation we find that at least part of the problem is support. But why ? Haven’t you employed an expensive bunch of experts to provide the expertise you don’t have, and take your IT problems away ? Well, probably not, for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, there’s often a mismatch between what your staff expect and what you’ve contracted for. Support companies cannot make money unless they control the amount of time they will spend on a particular client, and so they will sell services which they can bound, and quote extra for anything else. If you previously had an in-house IT person, they probably knew the business and your staff, and would be prepared to sit next to them and explain things. Often this facility disappears when support is outsourced, and this makes life harder for your staff.

Secondly, time passes, and what you need will change. Without someone on your staff who is at least thinking about IT, you will get what you’ve always been getting from your support provider, and this may not be right for you. Your staff will learn to take up the slack between what they need and what you’re getting, with predictable results: inconsistent processes, wasted effort, and often much grumbling about IT.

What to do, then ? It is absolutely key to know what it is your business needs from a support provider, and to make sure you get it. As mentioned above, there are many, many companies in this market now, and they offer many different flavours of IT support. Write down what you want, and conduct a formal comparison of companies to make sure that your candidate companies offer the services you want. It’s best not to start with any preconceived ideas, otherwise it’s all too easy to end up with what another version of what you already have. If necessary, get help from an uninterested third party with experience of requirements definition in order to ensure you have the best chance of getting what you need.

We can help you with defining your support requirements, either separately or as part of an IT HealthCheck. Contact us for further details.