Best Practices

Getting the most from your IT Support with these best practices.

Tech Advisory

Historically, buyers have always been on the losing end due to a lack of information or expertise on Tech products and services.  These are the old days of going back and forth with suppliers over specs, prices, reliability, among other requests.

However, basing on the principle of the Internet marketplace today "caveat emptor" – that is, “Let the buyer beware” ;-  it is only wise to engage guided conversations with trained specialists to help match required features and specs with underlying certified vendors.

In return you get high quality spec guarantees and protections on prices, handling transactions; overall enabling you to discover and build trust with the end provider.


 

Support Workflow

While some companies might have “unofficial” service level agreements, an SLA isn’t an SLA if it isn’t worked into the organization’s workflow. Otherwise, it just becomes a thing everyone will try to stick to, but will be impossible to track.

With a growing workplace of computers, applications, and communications; its crucial to unbundle complexities involved with vague maintenance service reporting; and ensure at baseline level your IT Support meets the SLA benchmarking, and yes, maintenance can be quantified. Here are three examples of ways to seamlessly incorporate workflows:

  1. Organize all your technical requests and automatically route them through the appropriate support workflow.
  2. Set up triggers to alert the IT Support team when an SLA is due and automatically escalate priority tickets to top of queue.
  3. Set triggers for when an SLA is violated, setting off a series of triggers that let the IT Support team and managers know, subsequently allowing you to create a report to keep track of your monthly progress.

RMA

Carrying out logistical requests for on-demand IT can be a hassle especially with need to participate remotely while leveraging a de-localized pool of verified suppliers.

Native IT support teams have inherently filled this role at baseline level acting as a single point contact (when carrying out spec matching, surface repairs, soft upgrades, etc). However, higher-stakes services such as backups, optimization, migrations, storage, server security, server support, etc require a particular specialized vendor for an increase in efficiency.

It is not uncommon for IT departments to operate computing services internally: for tasks such as patches and updates, monitoring systems, keeping hardware up and running, etc and embed outsourced expertise for highly complex value functions.