What, why, how?
Do you ever wonder why the quality of service you receive from your current IT Support company is often unreliable? Sometimes they’re great; sometimes they’re terrible. Even though they assure you that the service you are receiving exceeds all their goals, your staff continues to experience frustration and frequent issues.
Have you noticed your IT provider making the same mistakes repeatedly?
You are not alone! This article will explain what causes these service problems, how to resolve them, and the approach your new IT Support company should take.
We’ve seen many providers struggle to provide dependable, high-quality service in our many years of experience in the IT services market. This is due to the way they run their businesses and the fundamentals of their service approach, not the engineers they employ.
Here are the top six issues you may have with your IT Support company:
Have you ever left a message for your IT team, only for them to call you back at lunch? Or open a support ticket online for them to reach back out after a holiday weekend? This wastes time for both them and you.
Your IT provider can also cause unnecessary delays for administrative approvals, like when you need to download an application or need access to a new folder. It’s even more frustrating when you need access to a colleague’s email or calendar, but your IT team must wait for their designated approver to authorise that approval, delaying work for you and your team.
With instant chat support for non-urgent inquires, we can address numerous IT concerns immediately. This frees up time, so our engineers are available when you need them.
Sereno provides the ability to schedule a time convenient for you. This reduces wasted time and effort, meaning engineers can spend time finding the root cause of your issues and putting in place long-term solutions.
By working with you to create ‘approved’ software lists, we can remove the need for employees to contact us each time have to download or update the software they should have access to.
We have also removed the approval nightmare when raising a ticket that needs authorisation. You can select which approver it goes to, and an automated approval email is sent. With a simple click they can release us to get to work with your request without delay. Now when your supervisor is out on holiday, you can still get what you need.
Your employees will become increasingly frustrated if they are told an issue has been resolved, only to have it come up again a day or two later. When that happens, it’s easy to stop trusting your service.
By ignoring recurring issues, IT providers encourage the wrong behaviour in their staff by rewarding quick fixes and the ‘stick a plaster on it’ approach because it’s just another ticket off the board.
If a provider’s system is instead based around flagging and prioritising issues, we change the behaviour and approach the service staff takes. Now they’re focused on spending time finding the root cause and finding a long-term resolution. As these requests are prioritised, engineers know to check historic tickets for actions previously taken, so they don’t waste your time doing the same troubleshooting test again and again.
As we flag, prioritise, and report these internally and externally to the client, we don’t shy away from repetitive issues. Instead, track them down so we can solve them for you.
KPIs are a great way to monitor performance and encourage the right kind of behaviour in employees, however, they can have the opposite effect if the wrong ones are used.
We see IT providers using KPIs like “number of tickets closed per day” and “number of tickets on the board” to measure the success of their engineers and service desk. This promotes the wrong type of behaviour and gives you a poor experience. To meet these metrics, employees may be tempted to implement a “quick fix” to get the ticket off the board as quickly as possible, even if it means ignoring other issues. As a result, you may notice that the same issues keep coming up.
You’ll also see tickets closed without checking in to see if you were satisfied and customer service that leaves much to be desired. When providers incentivise and judge these performance indicators as quantity over quality, it comes at the cost of good customer service and care.
SLAs are used to evaluate service quality and performance metrics like “response within X minutes” and “closed within X hours.” Whereas these are fine management tools, they should not be the only KPIs. Response time could mean an email simply saying, “I’m looking into it” and hardly reflects the actual time it may take to solve the issue—if they ever do. This forces ticket closures within a set amount of time and promotes quick fixes, not long-term resolutions.
At Sereno, the most important measurement is your success and what we call our Partner Experience. Our KPIs and SLAs are internal measurements that go alongside many other performance indicators that managers use. All that matters to us is that the customer’s issue was addressed promptly, resolved in a sufficient amount of time, and that the resolution was completed and confirmed.
We only care about one statistic that can only come from you: the Partner Experience %. Only you can provide us with feedback on interactions, so it is a true reflection of our service quality and cannot be manipulated. You can rest assured that every facet of our business provides you with an exceptional experience.
IT providers have a wealth of information on how to improve your experience with IT but are often not motivated to share. When providers only measure the number of service tickets closed over time, how quickly they are closed, and how many issues are resolved, it’s not enough.
They’re useful metrics, but only when they are placed in the context of many others. By not categorising types of service requests and reviewing this as data over time (linked to other data sources like individuals, devices, and locations), they have a golden opportunity to improve their service and client experience.
We at Sereno easily identify patterns and spots for growth by classifying tickets and reviewing this data alongside other sources and contexts. Your IT provider’s goal should be the same as yours—fewer IT problems and fewer requests for service—so they should be actively working toward this rather than passively accepting whatever comes their way.
Reviewing trends allows us to foresee areas for improvement and give advice and solutions to address them proactively. It could be a specific system or tool that needs reviewing, team members that need to be retrained on programs, guides your team can have on hand, faulty hardware that needs replacing, or bigger elements that will feed into larger strategic projects to add value to the business.
The data collected from service tickets gives insights into future improvements and demonstrates how we can improve service and support your business.
As part of their service, most companies will assign you an account manager or advisor; however, the advisor’s role will naturally include recommending service and hardware upgrades, but these are far from the only benefits you should reap from working with them. They should offer strategic solutions that fill in gaps and mitigate the risks that otherwise would go unaddressed. And the provider takes care of management and upkeep, so the price is lower than if you bought the service outright. Just as an IT Director would, they should push for spending on the right kinds of tech.
We often find that ‘salespeople’ don’t understand how businesses use technology and are just focused on making a sale, so they can’t advise you properly. Your business goals should be considered when making recommendations, assuming a strategic approach. They should know more than just the products and services they sell to make recommendations or advise on what other companies like yours are doing. Short-sighted businesses like this fail because this requires a long-term outlook and well-trained advisors.
A true advisor should review all aspects of your IT environment and assess within the context and knowledge of how your business operates and what you want to achieve. This allows them to isolate relevant information and help you make informed decisions. A good advisor can help reduce risk in your business by identifying security gaps, improving key system reliability, ensuring disaster redundancies, or advising on ways to reduce support requests. This will reduce the day-to-day support you need through informed, proactive advice.
Failure to foresee or plan for staff sickness and holidays, client growth, client acquisition, and staff churn can leave providers under-resourced, significantly impacting your service.
It’s vital for providers to always be over capacity so they can adapt to demand. Many providers are unwilling to incur these additional costs, leading to much slower service.
This is then compounded by “panic hiring” where the provider needs engineers ASAP and doesn’t conduct proper due diligence on new hires, leading to unqualified engineers that deliver bad service; or end up leaving quickly, which causes more service disruption. Some IT companies don’t bother with onboarding or training new employees, sending them straight to the service desk, where they cause more problems than they solve because they aren’t familiar with the company’s procedures and infrastructure.
At Sereno, we understand the importance of knowing exactly how many and what type of on-call engineers you need. We also account for unexpected absences and your business growth, always ensuring you have the right amount of support on hand.
We also ensure that our sales and service departments work together and communicate. For example, if the sales plan is to bring on a certain number of partners per month, the service team should hire three months ahead. This allows time to hire, train, and evaluate engineers before they are needed on the service desk full-time.
This way, we never put undue pressure on our engineers, they know they’re fully supported and resourced at all times, and they can take their time providing excellent customer care and service.
Next Steps
If any of these six mistakes rings a bell, it may be time to start looking for a new IT provider with the expertise and experience to provide more reliable IT service.
Contact Sereno on 02030890141, hello@serenoit.co.uk and chat with one of our knowledgeable advisors on how we can help.
No commitment, no hard sell, just honest advice.
What, why, how?
Do you ever wonder why the quality of service you receive from your current IT Support provider is often unreliable? Sometimes they’re great; sometimes they’re terrible. Even though they assure you that the service you are receiving exceeds all their goals, your staff continues to experience frustration and frequent issues.
Have you noticed your IT provider making the same mistakes repeatedly?
You are not alone! This article will explain what causes these service problems, how to resolve them, and the approach your new IT provider should take.
We’ve seen many providers struggle to provide dependable, high-quality service in our many years of experience in the IT services market. This is due to the way they run their businesses and the fundamentals of their service approach, not the engineers they employ.
Here are the top six issues you may have with your IT provider:
One: Wasting Time Playing Phone and Email Tag
Have you ever left a message for your IT team, only for them to call you back at lunch? Or open a support ticket online for them to reach back out after a holiday weekend? This wastes time for both them and you.
Your IT provider can also cause unnecessary delays for administrative approvals, like when you need to download an application or need access to a new folder. It’s even more frustrating when you need access to a colleague’s email or calendar, but your IT team must wait for their designated approver to authorise that approval, delaying work for you and your team.
With instant chat support for non-urgent inquires, we can address numerous IT concerns immediately. This frees up time, so our engineers are available when you need them.
Sereno provides the ability to schedule a time convenient for you. This reduces wasted time and effort, meaning engineers can spend time finding the root cause of your issues and putting in place long-term solutions.
By working with you to create ‘approved’ software lists, we can remove the need for employees to contact us each time have to download or update the software they should have access to.
We have also removed the approval nightmare when raising a ticket that needs authorisation. You can select which approver it goes to, and an automated approval email is sent. With a simple click they can release us to get to work with your request without delay. Now when your supervisor is out on holiday, you can still get what you need.
Two: Not Flagging and Prioritising Recurring Issues
Your employees will become increasingly frustrated if they are told an issue has been resolved, only to have it come up again a day or two later. When that happens, it’s easy to stop trusting your service.
By ignoring recurring issues, IT providers encourage the wrong behaviour in their staff by rewarding quick fixes and the ‘stick a plaster on it’ approach because it’s just another ticket off the board.
If a provider’s system is instead based around flagging and prioritising issues, we change the behaviour and approach the service staff takes. Now they’re focused on spending time finding the root cause and finding a long-term resolution. As these requests are prioritised, engineers know to check historic tickets for actions previously taken, so they don’t waste your time doing the same troubleshooting test again and again.
As we flag, prioritise, and report these internally and externally to the client, we don’t shy away from repetitive issues. Instead, track them down so we can solve them for you.
Three: Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that Work Against You
KPIs are a great way to monitor performance and encourage the right kind of behaviour in employees, however, they can have the opposite effect if the wrong ones are used.
We see IT providers using KPIs like “number of tickets closed per day” and “number of tickets on the board” to measure the success of their engineers and service desk. This promotes the wrong type of behaviour and gives you a poor experience. To meet these metrics, employees may be tempted to implement a “quick fix” to get the ticket off the board as quickly as possible, even if it means ignoring other issues. As a result, you may notice that the same issues keep coming up.
You’ll also see tickets closed without checking in to see if you were satisfied and customer service that leaves much to be desired. When providers incentivise and judge these performance indicators as quantity over quality, it comes at the cost of good customer service and care.
SLAs are used to evaluate service quality and performance metrics like “response within X minutes” and “closed within X hours.” Whereas these are fine management tools, they should not be the only KPIs. Response time could mean an email simply saying, “I’m looking into it” and hardly reflects the actual time it may take to solve the issue—if they ever do. This forces ticket closures within a set amount of time and promotes quick fixes, not long-term resolutions.
At Sereno, the most important measurement is your success and what we call our Partner Experience. Our KPIs and SLAs are internal measurements that go alongside many other performance indicators that managers use. All that matters to us is that the customer’s issue was addressed promptly, resolved in a sufficient amount of time, and that the resolution was completed and confirmed.
We only care about one statistic that can only come from you: the Partner Experience %. Only you can provide us with feedback on interactions, so it is a true reflection of our service quality and cannot be manipulated. You can rest assured that every facet of our business provides you with an exceptional experience.
Four: Not Acting on the Data!
IT providers have a wealth of information on how to improve your experience with IT but are often not motivated to share. When providers only measure the number of service tickets closed over time, how quickly they are closed, and how many issues are resolved, it’s not enough.
They’re useful metrics, but only when they are placed in the context of many others. By not categorising types of service requests and reviewing this as data over time (linked to other data sources like individuals, devices, and locations), they have a golden opportunity to improve their service and client experience.
We at Sereno easily identify patterns and spots for growth by classifying tickets and reviewing this data alongside other sources and contexts. Your IT provider’s goal should be the same as yours—fewer IT problems and fewer requests for service—so they should be actively working toward this rather than passively accepting whatever comes their way.
Reviewing trends allows us to foresee areas for improvement and give advice and solutions to address them proactively. It could be a specific system or tool that needs reviewing, team members that need to be retrained on programs, guides your team can have on hand, faulty hardware that needs replacing, or bigger elements that will feed into larger strategic projects to add value to the business.
The data collected from service tickets gives insights into future improvements and demonstrates how we can improve service and support your business.
Five: Account Managers are Salespeople, Not Advisors
As part of their service, most companies will assign you an account manager or advisor; however, the advisor’s role will naturally include recommending service and hardware upgrades, but these are far from the only benefits you should reap from working with them. They should offer strategic solutions that fill in gaps and mitigate the risks that otherwise would go unaddressed. And the provider takes care of management and upkeep, so the price is lower than if you bought the service outright. Just as an IT Director would, they should push for spending on the right kinds of tech.
We often find that ‘salespeople’ don’t understand how businesses use technology and are just focused on making a sale, so they can’t advise you properly. Your business goals should be considered when making recommendations, assuming a strategic approach. They should know more than just the products and services they sell to make recommendations or advise on what other companies like yours are doing. Short-sighted businesses like this fail because this requires a long-term outlook and well-trained advisors.
A true advisor should review all aspects of your IT environment and assess within the context and knowledge of how your business operates and what you want to achieve. This allows them to isolate relevant information and help you make informed decisions. A good advisor can help reduce risk in your business by identifying security gaps, improving key system reliability, ensuring disaster redundancies, or advising on ways to reduce support requests. This will reduce the day-to-day support you need through informed, proactive advice.
Six: Not Staffing Ahead of Demand
Failure to foresee or plan for staff sickness and holidays, client growth, client acquisition, and staff churn can leave providers under-resourced, significantly impacting your service.
It’s vital for providers to always be over capacity so they can adapt to demand. Many providers are unwilling to incur these additional costs, leading to much slower service.
This is then compounded by “panic hiring” where the provider needs engineers ASAP and doesn’t conduct proper due diligence on new hires, leading to unqualified engineers that deliver bad service; or end up leaving quickly, which causes more service disruption. Some IT companies don’t bother with onboarding or training new employees, sending them straight to the service desk, where they cause more problems than they solve because they aren’t familiar with the company’s procedures and infrastructure.
At Sereno, we understand the importance of knowing exactly how many and what type of on-call engineers you need. We also account for unexpected absences and your business growth, always ensuring you have the right amount of support on hand.
We also ensure that our sales and service departments work together and communicate. For example, if the sales plan is to bring on a certain number of partners per month, the service team should hire three months ahead. This allows time to hire, train, and evaluate engineers before they are needed on the service desk full-time.
This way, we never put undue pressure on our engineers, they know they’re fully supported and resourced at all times, and they can take their time providing excellent customer care and service.
Next Steps
If any of these six mistakes rings a bell, it may be time to start looking for a new IT provider with the expertise and experience to provide more reliable service.
Contact Sereno on 02030890141, hello@serenoit.co.uk and chat with one of our knowledgeable advisors on how we can help.
No commitment, no hard sell, just honest advice.
