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Time and time again, I’m talking with prospective clients who are rightfully upset about the arrangement they have with their existing IT services provider.  These complaints usually revolve around an agreement that was advertised as taking care of their day-to-day IT needs but in reality falls short in several important ways.

Far and away, the biggest complaint I hear is that when they need help from their managed services provider, the response is just too slow.  We’re talking about “high impact” issues that go unattended for a couple of days at a time before someone even calls the client back, even though the client is paying for an elite class of service.    Mistakes happen sometimes and something will occasionally slip through the cracks for any it services provider, but clients don’t talk about things like this because it happens once.  They talk about them because they happen all the time and its something we hear from potential clients all too often.  Maybe some of these it support providers are busy helping people who don’t even have an arrangement, making their more deserving clients wait?  Of course we hear this about competitors that don’t offer structured service arrangements too, but in those cases I think “we’ll get to you when we can” is perhaps to be expected under such an arrangement.

A close second is the expression of “I’m paying real money every month and its supposed to cover my day-to-day IT support needs but I’m still getting a lot of other bills?  Why is this not covered?”   There seems to be a variety of opinion about what “ongoing maintenance” or “day-to-day” IT services actually cover.  I think most people expect that it covers basically anything that happens in the day to day operation of the technology.   Most people understand that some things are special projects:  a new office or an additional network server for example, but “why do we have to pay extra to have our managed services provider “unlock” the server so that our software vendor can get in and make changes.  Come to think of it, why isn’t the IT services provider trying to help with the vendor.  Isn’t this day-to-day IT?”  Or better yet,  “Why do I have to pay them to remote into my computer to install a piece of software that I need?”

A sidebar complaint is “I get these bills that are just outlandish and I call my IT company and they are just rude to me and tell me that that’s what the bill is and I have to pay it.  No discussion, no explanation.  Its like talking to the government.”    I’m sure that most managed services providers aren’t like this and try to be reasonable with bills.  The goal really should be to provide a good service at a good value.

Nobody is perfect, but we try very hard to provide excellent response time for important issues, fair billing and solid expertise.  We also try hard to make sure that we have clients set up with a managed service arrangement that makes the most sense for their situation.  I’m sure that we aren’t the only company with this philosophy but perhaps we are more unique than I imagine.   Do you have an amazingly good or bad experience with us or someone else that you’d like to share?  Email me or Give me a call- its free and no hooks.  Email me at chrish@intellisystems.com or call me at 706-722-2024.