Time to Shine for IT Providers

written by Lancom CommunicationsApr 1, 2020 4:11:37 PM

With the New Zealand government saying IT is an essential serviceone that enables businesses and workers to continue working from home, now is the time for IT providers to step up and shine.

The world has changed in the last four weeks with everyone working from home. This is a chance for IT professionals to demonstrate the value they add by going the extra mile, demonstrating their expertise and agility whilst remaining supportive and responsive to the needs of clients.  

New Zealand businesses shouldn’t suffer in silence so our support team have pulled together a blog on some of the key things you should expect to be receiving from your IT service provider whilst we’re in these unchartered waters.  

Have a read and remember we’re here to help.  

Response Times 
With everyone working from home there is bound to be increased queries and call volumes as people struggle with home broadband and VPNs. Response times slip from their usual levels as IT providers trto triage queries to deal with the most urgent ones first, but any increased response time shouldn’t be huge. Expect to wait a couple of hours, not days.  We’ve seen our query volumes and response times double whilst our average time to resolution also went up. Now that our clients are all successfully working from home our query volumes have returned to close to their usual levels. 

Customer Service 
With IT teams working long hours and under pressure you can expect customer service levels to slip slightly from their usual high standards. But again, this shouldn’t be drastic. Teams who are well trainedfollowing clearly defined processes and that have strong leadership should still be able to meet their usual levels of customer service. 

Network Outages
When something goes wrong, customers expect their managed services provider to work to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. A simple network outage could cost a small business thousands of dollarsYes we’re in unchartered waters but you shouldn’t ever expect or experience network outages. If you do, it means your on premise setup is failing and you should definitely be making plans to move to the cloud (we can help with that!). 

How to get it right
The above standards can all be met by focusing on quality and preparation. When choosing a managed services provider to support your business and technical operations, make sure you are checking they have good quality people and processes in place and that they have detailed continuity plans.  

Tell us about your experience
If you're a client or customer of ours, login to our portal now and let us know how working from home is going for you. If you're not a client or customer, we'd still love to hear about your experience. You can tell us via our LinkedIn page here.