Nearly every IT company promises fast, friendly support, which is the easiest thing in the world to put on a website and one of the harder things to actually do, so the promise itself tells you nothing.
What does tell you something is how the arrangement is structured underneath, because that is what decides how a bad day goes.
Who picks up
The useful question is whether whoever answers knows anything about your setup, and in a lot of arrangements they do not. You explain the problem to someone reading from a script, who logs it, who passes it to somebody else, who asks you to explain it again from the beginning.
That is not rudeness or incompetence on their part, it is what happens when support is organised around ticket volume rather than around teams who know each business properly. So ask whether a named team will be looking after you or whoever is free at the time, because there is a real difference between a queue that absorbs tickets from anybody and a dedicated team who already know your systems, your staff and your particular quirks before you ring.
What counts as fixed
Plenty of support closes tickets without solving anything. The printer works again, nobody knows quite why, and it will do the same thing in 3 weeks.
Good support is boring in one specific way, which is that the same issue stops coming back. If you are reporting the same fault every month then the fix has never actually happened and the ticket count is measuring effort rather than progress.
The things you never see
The best support work is invisible: patches applied before an exploit goes public, a failing drive swapped out before it takes the server with it, a backup checked, disk space cleared before it fills up at 4PM on a Friday afternoon. None of that generates a ticket, so none of it appears in a monthly report, and it is the part that decides whether you have a quiet year or an expensive one.
Worth asking about directly, because an arrangement that only ever reacts is cheaper to provide and considerably more expensive to live with.
Questions worth asking
Before you sign anything with anyone, including us:
- Will I deal with the same people, or whoever is free?
- What are you doing when nothing is broken?
- What is not covered, and what does that cost extra?
- How do I reach you at a weekend, and what actually happens then?
- Can you touch the software as well as the hardware, or only one of them?
- What happens if the problem needs somebody physically here?
- Am I tied in, and for how long?
Press on the last two. Plenty of support is remote only, which is fine until the problem is a dead switch in a cupboard, and a long tie-in tells you how confident a supplier is that you would stay without one.
How we do it
You get a dedicated team who know your company inside out. The same people every time, 7 days a week, who understand your setup before you have finished describing the problem, with nothing subcontracted to a stranger and nothing read off a script.
Most of the work happens ahead of the problem. Monitoring runs around the clock across your network and servers with alerts on the things that actually matter, so failing drives, filling disks, failed backup jobs and stopped services get dealt with before anyone in your business notices, which is why our quietest weeks tend to be our best ones.
We can fix the whole stack, because building software as well as supporting it means the application, the database and the server underneath are all ours to deal with. That removes the most common cause of delay in IT support, which is one supplier waiting on another, and there is nobody for us to escalate to because we are the people who would be escalated to.
Most work is remote, which is faster for you and keeps the cost down, but when a job genuinely needs somebody standing next to the hardware we come out rather than talking you through it remotely.
Microsoft 365, Azure and Intune are daily work for us as Microsoft Solutions Partners, so accounts, devices, licensing and security get handled properly rather than left at their defaults.
There is no long tie-in either. Every arrangement is built around what you actually need rather than a fixed package you have to grow into, and you stay because the service is good.
If you want a second opinion on your current arrangement, we will give you an honest read for nothing. The first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.