People are all too familiar with the term “nickel and dime”, regarding “putting a financial strain on someone by charging minor amounts for many minor services.” Sometimes providing IT services can come across that way, with a charge for a call here, charging for backups there, applying updates to your firewall occasionally… all these “nickels” add up, and can lead to a feeling of being charged for every little thing to the point where you’re paying a lot for your IT services.
This is the reason why many IT service providers are going to a “Managed Services” model, in which case your business pays a “flat rate” for “all the services you need”, no matter how many times you call*, or what hour of the day you need us**, routine maintenance or spur of the moment requests are covered***. Wait, was than an asterisk there? Yes, managed service contracts tend to have lengthy contracts with narrow stipulations as to what is covered, with additional charges for anything that falls outside of the scope of the services you agreed to at the beginning of the contract****. Oh dang, there’s another asterisk… contracts.
That’s not to say there aren’t benefits to a Managed Services plans, there certainly can be. The mindset of calling in or making a ticket at the first sign of trouble can be less stressful for some users, since they no longer need to worry about most calls costing anything, so you’re more likely to reach out for help, which saves your employees time, and you money since they can focus on their job, rather than computer problems. From an IT perspective, having a profitable contract in place incentivizes you to prevent problems in the first place, so some MSP’s are proactive about their support.
But the problems with managed services become more apparent in practice. As a fellow business owner, sit in my COVID-compliant, freshly sanitized chair and tell me how you’d handle the following problems.
You have a lot of calls now, since ‘calls are free’, but there are a lot of simple problems to fix. Are you going to hire another experienced technician to tell callers to reboot their computer, or are you going to hire a student fresh out of high school who only knows “reboot it”? What do the high schoolers do when they get a call that’s isn’t as simple as telling the customer to “reboot it”? How long are your customers waiting to talk to an actual technician?
With pre-paid support contracts, there’s a tendency for issues to take longer to resolve, or for issues to be quickly ‘fixed’ on the surface, without fixing the actual cause of the problem, leading to additional calls and wasted time in the future. Customer satisfaction isn’t as important when you’re dealing with contracts, since the customer can’t leave you anyways.
At Silver Pine I.T. we apply the same automation, management, and maintenance tools as MSP’s, allowing us to be proactive and efficiently assist our customers, while still not requiring contracts, or requiring high monthly services whether you have any problems that month, or not? We earn your business each and every call, since we know the only reason you’ll continue to call back is due to the excellent service, fair pricing, and unbiased recommendations we provide.
So ask yourself, is your current IT technician charging you $100+ every month for each computer in your office, including that system you use once a month in the conference room? If not, when’s the last time your IT guy contacted you about a problem they discovered without you calling? Who’s maintaining your network, and keeping an eye out for evolving threats when you’re too busy? Sure, we might charge you a nickel to fix that error we detected out of the blue, but the alternative is to either not maintain your network until it’s completely broken, or pay a dollar every month regardless of whether or not you need assistance that month. Maybe a nickel or two a month is cheaper after all.
