What to look for in choosing an IT services company?

Here’s 7 easy ways to tell if they’ll be able to support your business needs…

1. Onsite availability:

Ever been caught out with a system breakdown and your IT support team can’t get to your site to assist?

Maybe you’ve been lucky enough not to be affected by a scenario like this, but the day when you need some onsite IT help will invariably come. It can be not only frustrating, but also costly to both you and your clients, causing downtime and delays in your service delivery…

As we all know in business, time literally is money and lengthy delays could cost you more than just money, it can also erode your clients trust in you and your business reputation for reliability…

Firstly, check to see if your IT provider offers both remote and onsite work services and ensure the qualified service technician that visits your site has been fully briefed by his company, so you don’t have to go through the frustrations of trying to explain the problem with him again from the get-go…

2. Real-time billing

The amount of IT work required might only take 15 minutes to complete… So, why should you have to pay for an hour?

Have you been billed in one-hour increments? If so, your IT support is likely to be making off with unnecessary time billed for, which comes down to greater costs to your business than you budgeted for…

Can an IT support company justify charging you 2 hours service for an hour and 10 minutes of work completed? At SouthEast IT, we don’t think so…

Check to ensure your IT company bills in smaller increments than an hour.

SouthEast IT bill in increments of 15 minutes, so a small amount of IT Support will be charged in real time increments and invariably cost you much less than some of the other IT guys…

3. Qualified and fully trained Staff

Does your current IT Company let their technicians ‘practice how to do it’ on your business systems!

How do you know you are getting quality, certified IT expertise?

It’s worth asking to see if anyone working on your business systems has had the training and certifications required in order to provide the expected levels of service and support required by your business and its systems…

When working with SouthEast IT, you can rest well assured, all our friendly IT Support team members are fully certified in Microsoft, 3CX and Sophos and as an added advantage, our close vendor partnerships also can ensure you’ll be well looked after if we need to escalate any IT issue to our vendors if further investigation is required.

4. Dealing with an IT one man band? Outsourced technicians? Or a professional IT team?

Ever picked up the phone with an urgent IT problem, only to find your IT support guy is sick or is in Bali for two weeks on annual leave and just when you urgently need him, his IT support message bank is full? Or worse, you finally get through to leave a message, only to have a complete stranger turn up three days later as an ‘outsourced’ IT gun-for-hire?

Ensure you ask about IT emergency back up when dealing with any IT company…

Your business systems can’t afford to be out of action because IT Support are sick or on holiday for two weeks.

You can’t entrust your business documents and files, intellectual property, and client privacy to an outsourced ‘service guy’ you’ve never set eyes on before…

SouthEast IT have made it a point to have at least 5 fully trained, full time IT service technicians to provide for your every IT need and requirement and I can guarantee, we’re never all on holidays or all sick together! That is a promise.

5. IT information Storage

It’s important to ask your IT Support Provider these questions when considering your Information storage:

Does your IT company securely store your businesses IT information?

How do they maintain your information’s security?

Do they then charge you extra service costs to hand your information back to you?

Is there further charges if you choose to change providers?

You may find the answers to these types of questions a little shocking and you may also find some hidden costs and specific terms and conditions you weren’t aware of…

SouthEast IT have world class facilities and servers to securely store and manage your IT information.  It’s all just another part of the excellent service we proudly provide to all of our IT clients.

6. Subscription Licence Management

Subscription management is another area in IT where redundant or orphan licence subscriptions can be continually billed to your businesses credit card and unnecessary ongoing costs can get really out of hand if not checked up on and administered properly…

Ask whether or not your current IT company has a subscription licence billing system to keep costs to a minimum and this area of your business administration in check?

SouthEast IT have a billing system in place to manage your up to date license subscriptions all in one easy to find, itemised bill. You can call and speak to us at SouthEast IT at any time if you’d like to query a licence subscription or if you find a specific subscription is no longer required.

7. Support Services – Are they local or Offshore?

Here we are at tip number seven, which is by no means the least important because it’s the last… it’s a real consideration on how IT support mechanisms are provided in a timely manner.

It’s important to question your IT company about the phone support service they currently employ because more often than not these days, You’ll usually find If your company doesn’t have a local team to answer your call, it’s more than likely your IT phone request will be jettisoned off to an overseas call center in the Philippines, India or Sri Lanka as just another IT support ticket, which will eventually then go under the pile of all the earlier IT support tickets received, whilst you patiently ‘take a number’, then sit, wait your turn and twiddle your thumbs whilst you wait for an IT support response, maybe today… or possibly, tomorrow…

At South East IT, we know your business is important, We know time is money… Your business is too important to be dealt with by vague and questionable timeframes and unintelligible offshore customer service call centers. That’s why we’ve built a dedicated team of support staff to attend to your IT request as soon as you call. You’ll speak to a fluent, English speaking qualified technician, ready with the answers, advice and IT solutions you need, straight away. 

So, make the call, We’re waiting to talk to you.