Sing Along: “Is Your IT Provider Holding You Back?”

Sing Along: “Is Your IT Provider Holding You Back?”

Don’t you love hold music? The next time you’re on hold with your IT provider listening to the always-pleasant Muzak with which they annoy waiting callers, ask yourself, “Is my IT provider holding me back?”

All businesses get busy and fall behind a little – especially as the end of the year approaches. It usually only causes a slight disruption to customer service that is quickly smoothed out. This happens all the time: Amazon is late shipping an order, the grocery store runs out of eggs and other delays. It becomes a problem when those little disruptions begin to grow in frequency and severity. Customers will leave for a better-run and more stable competitor.

Even IT managed services providers (MSPs) get busy and fall behind. But if your MSP is regularly falling behind on your projects, failing to fulfill your service-level agreement or leaving your employees to watch their nails grow while waiting on hold with its technical support team, it’s time to make a change.

Why should these seemingly small frustrations make you consider a new provider? Because, ultimately, this isn’t about your MSP. It’s about your business. If your IT provider is down, you’re down. That means you’re now falling behind and unable to fulfill customer requests. Your IT provider is holding you back from satisfied customers, happier and more productive employees and more business.

IT Support – STAT!

When you need technical support, you often need it immediately.

Good IT support should:

  • Be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year
  • Be accessible from anywhere via phone and e-mail
  • Remediate most IT issues you experience within one hour to one day – at most

The above are the bare minimum support services your MSP should be providing you when it comes to IT support. If they aren’t, you should start looking for a new provider.

Service that Doesn’t Need Support

Let’s get one thing straight, though: your employees shouldn’t need to call your IT provider very often. If your MSP is effectively and efficiently serving your business, you won’t have computers regularly crashing, servers going down, successful cyberattacks and other major, unexpected IT issues. Only rarely should you need to contact your MSP to report a serious system failure, and they should already be aware of it.

We believe in providing our clients with excellent IT infrastructure and reliable solutions so they don't need to contact us – unless they just really want to chat. (We always love learning more about our clients and their technology challenges.)

Moreover, we proactively monitor our clients’ systems and often notify them of issues before they even notice them. We thoroughly test in-house every solution we offer to our clients. Our clients aren’t our guinea pigs.

The Stratus Difference

We take our clients’ businesses very seriously. When we onboard new clients, we take the time to learn about their business objectives, align their technology with their goals and ensure a solid IT infrastructure. We use a process-driven, documentation-driven method to ensure our clients have core processes in place as we build a roadmap for success together.

We also implement proactive monitoring so we can achieve a granular look at any issues their systems do experience. Moreover, we’re constantly improving our clients’ IT stability behind the scenes.

Finding the right IT provider can be difficult. If your MSP isn’t providing you with the responsiveness your business needs to continue to grow, it’s holding you back. Don’t let your IT provider hold you back.

If your current managed services provider isn’t quickly answering your calls, let Stratus IT show you what a valued IT partnership can do.