How to choose small business IT support

1. Experience and expertise

The experience and expertise of your small business IT support provider

Have you ever asked yourself: “surely, there’s a better way to do this?”

In 1990 we joined an IT Peer Group to accelerate our learning of IT best practices. Combining our experiences meant we could improve faster and reduce some mistakes.

While not rocket science, IT is reasonably complex and fast-paced. Technical knowledge is important, but so too is being able to apply that expertise to business goals and embed change so that real people understand and adopt technology.

Experience really counts when you are enabling change management. It’s the key to finding better ways to do things and delivering that “tech intensity” that closes the productivity gap.

Here's what you should look for when assessing the experience and expertise of an IT provider who can leverage IT to your advantage.

Signs you should look for

Certifications

Troubleshooting isn't guesswork – you have to know the technical detail and be able to think logically. Certifications tell you something about knowledge acquisition and arguably about knowledge retention if there’s a solid history of certification. But they don’t tell you an awful lot about logical and practical thinking.

Training and development

You are going to want to know a bit more about how they train and develop. Asking about how they select and recruit can be instructive about the sort of person you will get answering your call or running your project. But there are lots of possible exploratory questions to ask: what forms of training do they use, how do they research new services, how do they improve projects as they repeat them, do they conduct autopsies without blame? 

Efficient and effective help

It’s important to get the right person on the right job at the right time. Processes, scripts and checklists have their place on a helpdesk. None of us wants to fly with the airline pilot who doesn’t see the need to do the pre-flight checklist the day we are onboard.

And we all know the pain of the scripted helpdesk person who won’t, or can’t, put us through to someone else. Possibly because they are not trusted with the contact details of their senior colleagues!

Good IT support helpdesks and project teams have methods they are proud to discuss for measuring and re-calibrating responses. They will also routinely give you regular updates and reports.

Client retention

If they retain clients whose needs are like yours, for extended periods, this is a strong indicator they can provide the experience and expertise you need. 

Continuous learning

At the time of writing Microsoft365 has 1,669 updates in play on their official roadmap: 

• 606 in development
• 243 rolling out
• 814 launched and available

This gives us some idea of IT’s potentially overwhelming complexity and pace. It's easy to miss what is fundamental to success and not work out how to mould emerging tech into the “tried and tested” that Roxanne Morison mentions.

For you to benefit you want someone who has turned learning and adapting into something of a process. To deliver efficient and effective customer service to you they will have become continuous learners and improvers.

As they mature IT providers develop a set of standards that they know well and the ability to keep an eye on what will become a new standard. The training and development mentioned above will play an important role. They may inspire a sense of having “an inside track” on IT, from peer group membership, sitting on industry advisory boards, managing user groups, facilitating industry events, winning awards etc.

Discovery Audit

A paid, discovery audit with analysis and recommendations is an effective way to assess a provider’s expertise and experience. Its breadth and depth should illustrate the capabilities of the provider to investigate, analyse and backup their recommendations.

Many IT audits are free and because of that tend to be superficial or sales-oriented. So you are unlikely to gain much insight into their experience and expertise. Paid audits mean you get to test the mettle of senior techs and consultants before you commit to a year’s contract. It’s a good way to grow confidence in your choice before you sign up for a year or more.

Another indicator of a small business IT support provider's level of experience and expertise is their responsiveness, which brings us to our next important factor to consider.

3. Culture

The culture of your small business IT support provider

Key performance metrics can be motivating, but without the right culture, they can have unintended consequences. Here are some examples of how things go wrong in IT:

• First responders hit their required daily quota of “call intakes” and some engineers then slow down or stop answering phones.
  
  
• Keen engineers hang on to problems beyond their experience and implement non-standard “solutions” that create further problems.
  
  
• Project techs over-engineer solutions, getting carried away by technical features rather than on delivering business outcomes.

Such problems wear away at your budget, productivity, time and patience.

Culture is something frequently overlooked when it comes to picking a small business IT support provider, but it really shouldn’t be. The culture of the organisation you're partnering with tells you so much about how reliable, trustworthy and high quality their service will be.

An IT support provider with a business-focused culture regards technology as a tool to further your business aims, instead of a passion project implemented for its own sake. A necessary starting point to you receiving good service from an IT provider is them having happy and stimulated staff.

A healthy organisational culture develops individuals and teams so they are higher performing, more productive and responsive, providing higher quality support.

• The New Century Financial Corporation found that employees who are actively engaged at their job, feeling happy, supported and secure, outperform the competition by 20% and are 2.1% above industry benchmarks. They are also likelier to solve difficult problems faster.
  
  
• If you want further proof of why culture is so critical, ask your peers. According to Deloitte, an estimated 94% of executives believe a distinct workplace culture is important to business success.

An ideal provider wants their staff to fulfil their potential, so their clients can too. Here are some signs an IT provider has the culture to make your partnership successful.

Signs you should look for

Low staff turnover rates

IT is extremely competitive and demand for techs, especially experienced ones, remains high. If staff have been at the company for years, especially if they are a smaller provider, the culture there is likely to have something to do with this.

Staff rise up the ranks

This shows that they recognise potential internally, nurture staff to achieve their best and again, retain employees.

Testimonials

Typically displayed on the provider's site, these are curated so take them with a grain of salt, but they are an indicator of the client's experience with the company.

References from current or former clients

Feedback directly from current or former clients can help you discern a provider’s culture. Even if their business partnership didn’t work out, the provider is still likely to be spoken of in favourable terms.

Not all problems are IT problems

Many companies have values they hold to even if it is at a certain cost to themselves. IT providers should have examples of where they have not recommended a technical solution they could provide because it is not the best way to achieve the business goal and recommending doesn’t build a trusted partnership.

Here's an example from our own experience: 

A client had crucial monthly payments to make on a certain date. A payment system failure would be a major problem, so as part of their business continuity plan they asked if a mirrored server might be a solution. That’s an expensive, permanently available IT solution to cover an outage that would only be a problem one day a month. All the other days there was enough time to recover using their existing recovery plans. Our Technical Account Manager (who is not commissioned on sales) suggested confirming the bank would repeat the previous month’s payments and correct once systems were back online. This was acceptable to all parties as a plan. 

Another major factor in choosing an IT provider, which is deeply linked to culture, is cyber security.