People often ask how we can offer an ‘unlimited’ plan for support that includes both remote and onsite support, so I’m here to spill the secrets. It’s also a handy guide to how we make decisions on how to fix things…
The Prime Directive
Our primary goal is always to get things fixed as fast as possible, with the least amount of interruption, at the lowest cost for everyone, using an international standard to set priorities.
Priorities
We use the internationally recognised ITIL standard for setting the priority of issues. It looks a bit like this-
- Minor annoyance
- Affects your work, but you can carry on
- Multiple users affected, but can still work
- Large number of users or critical business function down
- Major event, multiple users unable to work
Who sets the priority? We do. That’s non negotiable as it allows us to give everyone the best service possible. We understand that if your email program won’t open, that’s a major problem for you. But if you can still use webmail, it’s a priority 2, not a 5.
Why Can’t You Come Onsite immediately?
Remote is faster, cheaper, less intrusive. But we’ll be there in person if something requires it.
Let’s look at an example- client says their email program won’t launch. That’s something that would take say 10 minutes to fix remotely, but to go onsite would take 30 minutes travel each way, 10 minutes to fix PLUS we would usually spend a bit of time on other things while there. So in reality we’ve spent nearly 2 hours on a 10 minute job.
Ultimately you have to pay for that inefficiency- can you imagine paying 10x the price for the same service? Neither can we. Doing as much as possible remotely means we could do 12 remote jobs in that 2 hour window…and everyone benefits.
Why Did The Tech Ask Me To Do X?
This the concept of ‘remote hands’ which is when we ask clients to help with simple things.
Example- we needed a device switched off and on again last week. With the help of a client that’s done in a couple of minutes vs another 2 hour chunk out of a technicians day.
Imagine the cost difference between being able to do 4 jobs per day vs 48? Neither of these figures is realistic, but you’ll agree there is a huge difference!
But That’s Not My Job
We have some rules around using your labour to help us. For instance we’ll never ask you to do anything really complicated. You’ll always have documents supplied with step by step instructions. We encourage you to tell us if you aren’t comfortable doing what is requested.
Onsites
We’ll send a tech onsite if we can’t fix something remotely, or if there is a major incident that requires it. A lot of the hardware we sell now can be sent straight from the distributor, and you plug it in and it configures itself. It’s simple, efficient and low cost. And we are always looking for ways to reduce your costs.
Scheduling
Often if you send in a ticket we’ll make a few suggestions for you to try, but if these don’t work or if we decide it needs a remote session, we’ll send you a link to schedule a remote session. You can choose any available time for us to remote into your machine and fix issues.
We would welcome your feedback and please get in contact if you wish to discuss this article- as always, we will change our policies if you can show us there’s a better way!