Top things to look for when picking a new IT Support provider
IT Support can be hard, and finding a competent IT Support provider can be even more difficult. Response times, employee qualifications, cybersecurity, IT best practices and more difficult to navigate topics and expectations. So where do you, the average business owner, even start? How do you start to vet your current IT Support provider and how do you look for a new one if you aren’t happy? IT is so critical to the day to day operations of companies, we find that many just settle for what they have and hope they are getting reasonable IT support services.
The truth is, many of the IT providers out there can be sub-par. There isn’t a real barrier to entry and there are no requirements or regulations that ensure you get a basic set of services. Barbers, plumbers, electricians, most trades must get a license, but anyone can wake up and say, ‘I want to provide IT Support services!’ So, where do you start?
1. What is their primary focus for IT Support?
What we mean by this question is what is the real focus of the business? Here at Bazar Solutions, we focus on Cybersecurity and how we secure our customers environment while also helping to solve technology issues. But first and foremost, we talk about cybersecurity. In today’s ever changing world, cybersecurity is the biggest challenge to most small businesses and protecting them from hackers, ransomware and down time caused due to a hacker is the largest risk. If a computer crashes, it’s inconvenient, if your network gets locked down, that could put you out of business. If you’re not sure about your cybersecurity, check out our free cybersecurity scan offer. You can also check out our CyberCare Cybersecurity services page.
2. What about ongoing training for their engineers?
IT changes quickly, with multiple updates to best practices sometimes monthly. So, what does the IT Support provider do to ensure the techs they have are up to date and know best practices. Another side of training is knowledge share. We create knowledge base articles, have a documentation system to ensure we know how different customers are all setup. On top of that we do trainings at least every 2 weeks where we share knowledge and best practices with all our IT support staff. We also have technical training goals for all our engineers around industry standard certificates.
3. Do they have insurance?
This question is more geared into smaller companies, but really should ask all companies you are looking for IT support. Typically, bigger companies have insurance, but many smaller companies don’t, or they have really small limits. Additionally, make sure that the IT support provider has cyber liability insurance and that they have adequate limits. Just having $50,000 limits around cyber is not nearly enough these days. It most likely needs to be in the millions of dollars, and if they don’t have enough coverage and they are involved in a hack, there is a good chance they will go out of business and you won’t have anyone to try to get claims against any losses you suffered because of the hack.
4. How do they measure customer satisfaction, and do they report it?
Changing IT support providers is hard, so many customers stay with the current IT provider, even though they aren’t happy. So, how does the IT support provider measure customer satisfaction and do you, the customer, have a way to see that? We put it right on the website. If you go back to our Bazar Solutions home page, scroll down towards the bottom and you will see a real time widget that reports our current customer satisfaction based on ACTUAL feedback from customers over the last 90 days. Every ticket we close and note we send to a customer has a little ‘survey’ at the bottom of the ticket allowing the end user to say we are doing Great / Meh / Bad. That feedback is sent directly into our internal chat systems as well so we know if we are dropping the ball.
Now, we could go on and on with questions, but asking these will get you a better understanding of the companies you are talking to for IT support. What drives them, what coverages do they have and do they keep employees up to date on the latest and greatest. Your goal is to find a company that cares about you, cares about your cybersecurity, cares about their staff, and then has the correct policies and insurance in place to make sure they can survive ‘worse case’ scenarios.
Check out our CompleteCare full IT Support page.
