Asking Your IT Company The Hard Questions

Have you settled for sub-par IT support? If so, how can you know for sure?

When you outsource the management of your information technology, you’re offloading the responsibility of monitoring, maintaining, and securing your environment to a third-party. So how do you know you’re getting what you’re paying for?

By asking the right questions…

4 Questions To Ask Your IT Company

1. How Does Your IT Company Deal With Downtime?

Downtime is bad news. It leads to decreased productivity, diminished trust with clients and lost wages.

The main cost of downtime is not the fix itself, it’s the halt in your business’ productivity. If an IT-related or natural disaster occurs and takes critical systems offline, employees will be unable to complete their tasks, yet your normal business expenses will carry on.

Significant downtime could mean the end of your business – so make sure your IT company is dedicated to catching and resolving any system issues before they lead to downtime.

2. Does Your IT Company Offer Industry-Specific Expertise?

Do you get the impression that your IT company’s staff knows about as much about technology as you do?

Whether you think you’re getting their most novice technician most of the time, or even worse, that their team as a whole is just Googling answers to your questions, then it’s time to move on.

Don’t just accept basic, generic services. Make sure that your IT company understands your needs. They should provide technology specifically geared towards making your work easier and more effective. They should deliver tools and solutions to streamline tasks, increase productivity and guarantee you get a fantastic return for your technology investment.

IT support isn’t just a matter of getting someone to handle something you don’t have time for. You’re not hiring someone for unskilled labor – you should be hiring someone that has knowledge and skills that you don’t have yourself. You should be paying for an expert.

3. Does Your IT Company Offer Quick & Effect Response To Support Requests?

It should be relatively simple to find out if your IT company has a set response time. Either they offer a guaranteed response time as detailed in a contract, or they should at least be able to provide some form of data to show how quickly they handle real-life examples of support calls. It’s a bonus if they have testimonials or case studies that show how they respond to their client’s needs, and what the results were.

As a follow up to the previous question, you should find out how they receive, track, and follow-through on support requests. Do they have an online ticket system? A support email address? A 24/7 Help Desk, via chat or phone? Get specific so that you can understand how the support request works.

4. Does Your IT Company Offer Technology & Strategic Consulting? 

You need to be able to provide your full attention to the work you’re doing, not your IT. IT consulting services should give you expert guidance and ensure you’re always making the best investments and decisions to guarantee a long and successful future for your operations.

You don’t want to miss out on the latest and greatest in IT innovations. Your IT company should be able to give you the advantages that come with the most recent applications of technologies like the cloud. Cloud technology, when properly implemented and supported, will allow you to minimize your hardware, scale easily, and gain access to your data when and where you need to.

Finding The Right IT Company For You

Selecting a company to maintain your technology is one of the most important decisions you can make for your business. You must find the most competent and reliable IT support provider in your area.

Don’t just pick a company off the Internet because they’re the closest one to you. Do your research to find out if they are truly qualified to protect your data and meet your organization’s unique IT needs.

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