Watching for Red Flags in Customer Satisfaction

Because businesses rely increasingly more on technology to deliver value, thy cannot offer a poor or insufficient IT support function, whether its internal or outsourced. A poor IT support function means more downtime, lower productivity and less profitable value which can all impact the satisfaction of your customers, who are at the heart of your business’s success.

In this piece, we examine some red flags to look out for in an IT support provider. These red flags can directly impact your business, stopping it from reaching the potential value that IT support has to value for driving productivity, customer satisfaction and growth. Here’s what to look out for.

Their communication skills are lacking

Without quality communication, your IT support provider will not be able to deliver the potential value that your business could enjoy. Some providers deliver poor customer service; contrary to stereotypes, IT support providers do not need to be dry and technical, they can deliver friendly, enthusiastic and jargon-free support that enables faster, better and relationship-strengthening outcomes.

Your IT provider should be helpful, friendly, dedicated and patient. Acting in a way that shows enthusiasm for their work. With a quality provider, providing IT support is not an obligation, it’s a chance to realise a passion for helping people to get the best from technology. They ought to serve as a consulting presence for your company, readily there to help with both significant and minor issues, showing a dedication to advising you towards the best day to day and strategic outcomes.

In all, your provider may not be the strategic IT partner that your company needs as it navigates substantial changes if they are significantly silent, only communicate in convoluted jargon, and never offer suggestions on their own.

The service standard is determined by service level agreements

Wait, isn’t that ideal? Why not have an IT support provider that meets its commitments? Of course, this is good, but a trustworthy IT vendor will seek to go above and beyond, treating its SLAs as a minimum benchmark rather than the extent of its commitment to your business. A proactive commitment to your business feeds into better profitable value and customer outcomes for your business, as well as empowering your team with a friendly and insightful service.

Intangible components won’t be listed in an SLA for IT support. For instance, your provider should be extremely technically knowledgeable and should be able to describe changes and actions to quantify these intangible benefits. Any financial or legal restrictions should be known to them, and they should build solutions with these in mind. Additionally, a top-notch IT supplier would place a strong emphasis on service components like proactive network maintenance that might be less constrained by contractual performance obligations.

Although contractual obligations are essential for defining the terms of service provision, if all you receive from your supplier are those obligations, you can question if you’re getting the full potential value for money that your business deserves. There are providers out there that can go above and beyond for your business; to them, doing this is a win-win.

Your network is being crippled by recurring problems.

This is a particularly big red-flag, as IT support providers should be able to resolve issues at their root-cause, preventing them from happening again.

Critical elements of IT support include remote supervision and maintenance. To protect the overall integrity of your environment, your IT provider should handle software and operating system upgrades, network health checks, and remotely applying security fixes. Keeping your environment safe from cyber threats and minimising downtime are the key goals of these activities.

If the same issues keep happening to your company’s network or if network outages happen frequently, your provider is likely skipping preventative maintenance. Moreover, even if they do address issues around outages and network performance, it’s also a sign that they are addressing the issue at a symptom rather than causal level, which is an inefficient drain on the potential value that your IT spend could be harnessing for your business.

Too many promises

A key reason why businesses outsource their IT support, is to gain access to a broad range of knowledge and experience that would be very expensive to build internally. A provider with a breadth and depth of technical abilities is a wonderful benefit to businesses but be wary of providers that promise that they can ‘do it all’, especially if they have a small team.

Without a team of experts, maintaining technical competency in every imaginable area in the large, complicated world of business technology is a difficult task. If you’re looking for an IT support provider, query accreditations, vendor relationships, and case studies and testimonials.

In essence, if a provider makes big promises, verify them against the evidence and query these promises against your goals, ask them specifically how they can help your business to achieve its goals. If a current IT support provider is displaying a gap between what they have promised and what they are delivering, this is also a good sign that you’re getting sub-optimal support that will ultimately affect your bottom line and delivery for your customers.

Conversations are overly centred on products

In the end, technology is not just there for your company to use; it is also there to help it. Knowing this, astute IT service providers begin a conversation with their clients to learn about their needs, limitations, and issues. They then work wrap the solutions around their clients needs, goals and priorities to deliver maximum value.

Unfortunately, some providers can opt for a different strategy, where they begin a discussion by making a pitch for a service or product without enough consideration for their clients specific needs. This lack of nuance means that the support will not be tailored to your business, and therefore deliver sub-optimal value to your business and its customers.

An IT provider that delivers the best value to your business and its customers will take the time to learn about your business, its constraints and goals, how it prefers to operate, its values, as well as the commercial and regulatory landscape its operating within. In the end, an IT support provider will never have a full understanding of your business’s inner workings, but without cultivating enough of an understanding and showing a desire to gain it, it’s also likely they aren’t delivering tailored, strategically valuable support to your business.

Reviewing your provider’s performance on some of these fronts may be necessary to decide if they can be the right fit for your business going forward.

Brightskye, your Glasgow IT Support partner

Are you seeking exceptional IT support in Glasgow? Look no further than Brightskye, your premier partner for IT solutions in the heart of Glasgow. Our dedicated team of experts is committed to providing you with proactive IT support, robust cybersecurity measures, cutting-edge cloud services, and more to ensure the seamless operation of your business. With our swift response times and transparent pricing, we guarantee that your technology empowers your business while safeguarding your invaluable data and upholding your reputation against cyber threats. When it comes to IT solutions, don’t compromise – choose Brightskye for dependable services that fuel your business’s success. Reach out to us today at 0141 212 2240 to embark on a brighter IT journey in Glasgow.