True 24/7 support of a network is when technical resources are available to immediately respond to issues 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. As the world moves into a 24/7 operation where people are working from home and at all hours of the day and night, this brings a new challenge for us as a Managed Services provider.
How do we provide support for our clients 24 hours a day? What would it take to have someone monitoring client networks and reacting at all hours? And most importantly, how do we deliver that support at a cost effective price point of $2,500 a month for a smaller client?
Unfortunately offering true 24/7 support in the small and medium sized business market would be very cost prohibitive for our clients (that’s why smaller MSPs are turning to partners that are larger for help according to a recent MSPmentor blog post. But in our experience, this creates service degradation). Many providers claim to have 24/7 support, but what they really mean is that they have a pager or alerting system that will hopefully wake someone up in the event that there is an issue during non-business hours.
In order to provide superior service at a manageable price point, the Compuquip Support Team has implemented a hybrid model. Every week day morning we have an engineer checking all systems beginning at 6AM to get a jump start on any issues that may have happened overnight. Each weekend Compuquip assigns an engineer to check all client systems twice a day (mid morning and early evening) to make sure there are no issues. As a fail-safe we do have a 24/7 call center we contract with that will take a client call no matter what time and then locate the appropriate engineer.
We spend a large amount of time, money, and resources on proactively monitoring our clients’ networks and working with them to improve performance that will prevent failures from happening. But technology, as we all know, just “seems to break” at the worst time. Our support philosophy is that we focus on how we respond in these difficult times and learn from them to limit the same problems in the future.
Compuquip will continue to weigh the priorities of our clients to develop the most effective support model for their needs.
