Two Approaches to IT Support. One Clear Winner

As a modern business, your success depends on your technology functioning properly. As many businesses have discovered when their solutions did not function as intended, the effects can have considerable impact to their success rates. To help keep your business running, you need to be sure that your solutions are maintained.

How Not to Help Your Business
When many people hear the term “tech support,” the first thing that pops into their mind is the common perception of IT services, which is also known as a break-fix approach.

This approach usually plays out in the following way:

• Something breaks or stops working as expected and a user (or users) can’t get work done.
• You reach out and contact tech support.
• A tech has to be sent out to resolve the issue.
• You wait for the tech to arrive.
• The tech arrives and resolves the issue. You pay the support fees.
• Your affected employees are able to return to work.

While this approach does ultimately get your technology issue resolved, consider how much you’re really paying each time this happens. Sure, you’re paying your IT provider for their services, but there are other costs associated with this approach. Your employees still have to be paid for their time, even if the issue rendered them unable to complete their tasks.

You also have to consider if the issue affected any of your clients as well. If the issue prevented them from receiving the benefit that they utilize your services for, they are not likely to be very pleased with you. If it happens often enough, many will likely seek out a competitor.

Clearly, while this approach works, it certainly doesn’t minimize the damage an issue can potentially cause your business.

How to Really Help Your Business
Many businesses today are moving away from that version of tech support in favor of a different approach: managed services.

With managed services, the approach to resolving technology issues plays out much differently.

• One of the managed service provider’s technology specialists notices that a mission-critical component on your network might soon experience an issue. They reach out and inform you of the potential issue.
• The MSP works to fix the problem remotely, if applicable.
• If the issue is covered by your service level agreement with the MSP, you pay nothing more than the predictable, monthly service fees.
• Your employees are able to continue their work, with little to no interruption.

Managed services, like the ones that Directive can provide, will help you to minimize the amount of downtime that your business will experience. By working proactively to monitor and maintain your solutions, you can ensure that your workforce remains productive. Give us a call at 607.433.2200 to learn more.