1. Your IT Managed Service Is the Wrong Type
It’s not your fault. Most people would have no way of knowing that managed IT services come in different flavors. Or how that affects IT support.
Perhaps you signed up with a managed service provider (MSP) when your business was small and only required someone to keep the printers operating and the individual computers networked. Whenever something went wrong, you simply called your MSP, and they sent someone out to fix it. That’s the “firefighter” approach.
However, today’s business environment calls for a more sophisticated, strategic approach. Now you need to make sure that your employees and your clients can access whatever they need from anywhere at any time. Their experience must remain smooth and unimpeded while all of their information remains secure.
The old “firefighter” approach just won’t cut it anymore. Instead, you need to find an MSP who can strategize with you to install the IT infrastructure that best fits your business and that helps you grow securely.
2. You Weren’t Able to Establish Good Rapport with Your Current MSP
For a variety of possible reasons, you chose to outsource all or part of your IT services. An in-house IT operation would allow your IT personnel to get to know your business in detail. But when you started with your MSP, you signed on for a set of services without going through any sort of strategic process.
Perhaps your MSP doesn’t really understand your business sufficiently to offer strategic suggestions. That, and whatever personality differences emerge, can keep you from getting the service that you need.
To fix this, you should find an IT provider who will take the time to get to know you and your business, who can offer strategic advice from an IT perspective, and who has communications procedures in place to respond to you and your employees appropriately.
3. Your MSP Lacks a Good Way to Contact Them
Especially when you’re running a small business, it can be very irritating to contact your MSP only to be connected with an automated bot. That way of responding to you might be convenient for the MSP, but not so much for you.
Every business is different. Your IT infrastructure and way of doing things is unique to your business. When you contact your MSP via email or phone with a problem, you need a response from a real person who understands your way of doing things.
That’s why at Now IT Works, we always answer the phone with a smile, listen to what your problem might be, and put you in touch with a team member who can address your issue. We respond to emails personally and promptly in a similar fashion.
4. Your Business or Your MSP Lacks a Clear Workflow
When you contact your MSP with a concern, do you get the impression that someone copies that concern onto a sticky note to be placed on someone’s desk with all the other sticky notes? After a month of silence, you call to ask what’s going on with your problem, and they act like they’ve never heard from you previously. It doesn’t have to be that way.
Rather, your MSP should have an established workflow. That is, after learning about your concern in detail, your MSP should create a ticket that describes what needs to be done, the steps involved in resolving your issue, and a calendar of periodic times when you will be updated about what’s happening. Each issue or concern should have a separate ticket.
Whenever a problem has been resolved, you are notified, and its ticket is closed. This way, nothing is overlooked, nothing falls through the cracks.
5. You Don’t Have an MSP with Whom You Can Work Strategically
For technology to work for your business to help it flourish, you need to integrate your technology into your way of doing business. Doing so requires strategic planning.
Therefore, you need to have an MSP who understands your business’s objectives, methods, and workflow. How do you communicate with prospective and current clients? What are the crucial steps that must be navigated? How do you deliver your product or services? What are your data storage and retrieval needs?
These and other strategic questions must be addressed in a way that allows technology—both hardware and software—to smooth out the process and reduce the possibility of error. The aim is to have technology improve efficiency and technology while keeping your business and client information secure.
Such an approach will reduce the frequency of recurring problems and will reveal opportunities for achieving greater productivity and growing your bottom line.
Now IT Works specializes in this sort of strategic engagement with our clients. Contact us to see the difference that can make for your business. Get the IT support your business needs by setting up a free consultation here.