There are countless benefits to outsourcing your IT support provider.
To start, you’ll cut costs by not paying for an in-house team member for time and services you don’t need. Next, you can rest assured the IT specialists helping you are truly knowledgeable and experienced because they assist many different businesses daily.
While employing an IT support provider like Mustard IT will certainly behoove your company and its growth, how do you choose the right one?
With so many options available, discerning quality may be a confusing task.
This article looks at five key factors to think about when it comes to finding the best IT support provider for your business.
Why Outsourcing?
F1 IT Support Canberra states that outsourcing IT gives your business the competitive edge it needs to be successful, equipping you with the latest technology and adequate resources as you need them.
Even if your business is on the smaller side, it often has access to the resources of large businesses because all resources are pooled with the other businesses your IT provider serves. This ensures that your technological security needs are fully met and prioritized to mitigate risks and protect company data.
Overall, allowing an IT support provider to help will allow your team to better focus on your business instead of being distracted by IT decisions. Any good IT service provider commits to resolving its clients’ IT issues promptly so they can return to business as usual.
If you’ve decided to outsource, here are five ways to tell if the IT provider you want to hire is of top-notch quality:
1. Quick Response Time
One reason you hire an IT provider is so your staff members can concentrate on their work and not ruin the momentum of their workflow.
If you can’t rely on your IT team to resolve issues promptly, this purpose isn’t being fulfilled.
Additionally, customers don’t want to wait too long because of tech-related problems, either. When your website is down or they can’t use technology properly to interact with your products and services, that’s a major setback.
Many providers offer 24/7 on-call support so if your staff members are working outside of normal office hours, they can receive help if they need it. Your provider should get back to you as quickly as possible; within 15 minutes is a reasonable amount of time to expect to wait. They should be able to usually solve the problem within 4 hours, as well.
If they cannot fix the problem remotely, they should be able to perform a site visit by the next day.
Your potential IT providers should inform you of these response time expectations; if they don’t, ask what they are.
2. Business Consultancy and IT Advice
Service providers are much more than on-call help desk associates.
In fact, they often offer business consultancy, particularly in IT-related areas and business decisions.
As experts in the field of technology, they can give you information about technological equipment and how to utilize it to stay competitive. Providers solve bigger problems when it comes to technology in business, like transferring data files from a local hard drive to a cloud-based server.
Further, they are accustomed to paying attention to large-scale business goals, which may inform advice given around your tech-related decisions. Additionally, they understand compliance as it relates to technology and will consider this knowledge, too.
If a considered IT support provider only assists with minor IT issues, they’re probably not your best option.
3. Keeps Your Business Secure
The last thing you need to worry about is keeping your company’s data secure, and yet this is the first thing your IT provider should think about.
That’s because this aspect of IT care is crucial for your business, as is ensuring it is protected. Concurrently, data breaches and cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly common.
As consultants, your IT team should follow up with your business, its successes, and failures, and share how technology can be used to improve it.
They can often catch issues before you do, and raise concerns before you realize they deserve attention.
For example, your network will ideally be monitored constantly, and alerts will be sent to your IT provider if threats are detected. This type of monitoring often prevents problems before they can happen or escalate too far.
5. Specialized Knowledge
IT consultants are not just technology experts; they are experts of technology’s specific role in business. Excellent IT consultants will regularly update themselves and even attend seminars both about the newest ways to use technology, and how to use it most effectively for business purposes. Additionally, certain IT companies focus on a particular area of business for this reason. They have knowledge and experience in a niche area of clientele so that they can really focus on it and call themselves experts. See if there are providers out there that specialize in your area of business.
Search Carefully
When selecting an IT support provider for your business, keep in mind why you’re hiring them in the first place. Ensure they fulfill your needs more adequately than any other.
This means they:
- shouldn’t keep you or your customers waiting too long to resolve issues.
- should act as consultants and help you make business decisions with their specialized knowledge.
And, perhaps most importantly: they should work hard as possible to keep your business cyber safe and detect problems before they can threaten your business.