Often companies prolong the outsourced IT support evaluation process even though the organization is feeling pain associated with their current support model. Many factors contribute to this delay including a personal relationship, fear of the cost of switching, timing and/or the overwhelming task of interviewing and comparing service providers. Whatever the factors, the pain the organization is experiencing is likely costing you money either through employee efficiency, downtime, unneeded management of the provider or not keeping you abreast of new technologies that keeps the organization competitive. Like any sickness, there are telltale signs you need to watch out for when diagnosing the problem.
These 9 signs often point to a sign that it’s time to explore your outsourced IT support services:
- You get complaints from staff that the support provider doesn’t seem to know your environment and you’re constantly having to re-explain the setup. The tech you used to have knew everything and now he/she was promoted or left, and nobody seems to know your environment anymore.
- You get complaints from staff that they have to wait for days to receive a response to a simple issue and more importantly the resolution does not always work.
- You feel nickeled and dimed on IT issues and it’s hard to budget for IT.
- You have had several security issues occur that have compromised your data or interrupted your operations and there is no clear plan proposed to address security. In addition, your provider may be charging you extra to remediate these issues.
- Deep-down you have a feeling like you’ve outgrown your provider as they are not helping you stay on top of and move forward with technology.
- Your staff comments on the lack of communication on issues and follow up. When they’re onsite, no communication occurs around the tasks they are there to complete.
- You feel your provider is not able to clearly and effectively communicate technical issues and often don’t understand what they are trying to communicate.
- Your provider does not work with you to create an annual technology budget or technology plan
- When you submit a help request it feels like your provider does something different every time. It appears they do not have solid process to provide a consistent level of service delivery.
When it comes to finding out what your current IT team is doing right, and what they need to improve on, organizations everywhere are trying to find the correct way to measure it. Our experts here at Applied Tech have designed this quick, 2-3 minute assessment to evaluate how well your IT team is functioning for your organization. Click here to find out how your IT team stack up.
Did this article resonate all to well with you? Click here to view part two of this series, 5 Critical Factors to Consider in a New Provider.
This article was written by James Walstad, Director of Sales at Applied Tech. James has over 20 years IT expertise where he has overseen various technical projects from implementing storage systems, supporting multi-server environments, and numerous cloud migrations.
