Urgent signs that say you need to change your IT support

Good vendor relationships can go bad. Here’s how to know it’s time to make a change for the better.

Key Takeaways:

• Excellent IT support helps  businesses thrive.
• Fixing something only after it breaks is bad practice.
• Billing headaches are another.
• Are you really getting support to succeed?

Businesses are about relationships. Personal relationships can change over time, and business relationships can too. It takes work and time to maintain healthy, mutually beneficial relationships. If the partnership with your IT support loses its spark, you have two options: repair it or cut your losses.

Sometimes, knowing if a business relationship has soured is hard, so we've provided some tips. If there are red flags, attempt to work things out with your vendor. At the very least, try negotiating better terms. Otherwise, move on.

Here are the 11 urgent signs it’s time to change IT support. Some are obvious, some less so.

In upper management, your IT support experience may differ significantly from that of employees. Great IT-managed services support means all company employees are treated equally. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Some will give white-glove service to VIP contacts but short shrift to rank-and-file staff. 

We recommend soliciting regular feedback to judge employee sentiment. Then, take it seriously. They’re in the trenches daily with IT, and lousy support means lost productivity and operational efficiency.

Proper IT support comes with an understanding of what you’re getting for what you’re paying. If this is unclear, set up a meeting with your point of contact. They should provide the terms of your service agreement and a straightforward explanation of provided services.

Then, you can compare your costs vs. the support services received and calculate ROI. If you’re not getting actual value from the money spent, you have likely outgrown your vendor. 

3. Support ticket resolution time has increased

How are things going with your IT support help desk? IT problems should be tracked within individual support tickets. Let’s say it’s a year after you signed that agreement for IT support. Do resolutions take longer? Your IT vendor must keep up with you as you scale in size and complexity. Longer time-to-resolution issues often indicate you’ve outgrown your IT support.

Another  measurement indicator is the total number of outstanding tickets over the past year. If these increase month over-month, it’s time to make a change.

This is how it should work: open ticket volume should shrink due to more efficiency in infrastructure and technology policies. Be cautious when the total number of outstanding tickets per employee is higher month-over-month or year-over-year. This should never happen.

Proactivity is the hallmark of excellent IT support. If you’ve worked with your IT vendor on large projects or shored up poor configurations slowing your network, efficiency should have increased. 

After these projects , your vendor should check in regularly to suggest further improvements based on proactive maintenance and monitoring. 

Technology is changing rapidly, and your IT support should be meeting with you for regular checkups and strategy sessions. If not, you’ll be in an endless loop of break-fix, where your systems limp along, surviving rather than thriving. 

Break-fixing IT is no way to keep a business running. It’s a sure sign that your current vendor doesn’t have the ability – in manpower, technology, or expertise – to keep you ahead of the curve and preserve your competitive edge.

Excessive wait times are the bane of business. How can you be efficient if it takes hours to reach an expert IT engineer? 

If it’s more than five minutes, you’re working with an IT vendor stretched too thin. What’s normal? Check out these IT support help desk benchmarks to see how your wait time compares to industry standards. 

Everything, including your business technology, begins with a sound strategy. Otherwise, it's similar to a break-fix approach. Your business technology policies, processes, and infrastructure should align with your organization’s overall mission and goals. Your IT support should be so focused on strategic IT that it’s the main topic of discussion with your account manager.

Are you and your vendor BOTH current on tech trends? Your ability to execute a competitive advantage depends on your knowledge of industry tech trends. More importantly, your IT support needs to know the next big thing in business technology. 

Whether or not you need the next big thing requires your IT support to facilitate an open and ongoing dialogue about what’s relevant to your business. Change comes with risk, but it can also unlock fantastic opportunities, which, with the wrong vendor, you’ll never know about. The right provider can mitigate risk and get you on the path to more growth.

A good managed services provider is a partner with all the bells, whistles, and confidence that comes from a good relationship. Objective measurements aside, you must have the essential elements of trust, respect, and connection.

True partners strategize and diagnose issues together. Partners teach you about technology and share the why behind your infrastructure setup. You teach them about your business. What is your gut telling you about how partnerships should operate? Partnerships should be profitable and have a win-win business relationship.  Do you and your IT provider operate this way?

When your relationship with your outsourced IT support began, you made an agreement. How well have they kept their side of the bargain? Are things playing out as expected, or have broken promises put you in a tough spot? 

Sadly, many vendors can’t keep up when their client’s business grows, or they spread themselves too thin. Broken promises are a sure sign you’ve outgrown your IT support.

Relationships can fade. Words may have been exchanged, or situations may have stirred up anger and destroyed trust, souring the relationship. You may wonder, “Who are these people, and what happened?”

This is a bad sign. Your once trusted and respected partner has become a stranger. Face the situation head-on. What can they do to regain your trust? You may not have outgrown them, but they have client maintenance issues. Decide if you can keep or jettison them.

Do IT projects or monthly support reconciliation eat up your time? Are you constantly arguing with your managed IT provider on costs and prices? Do you know your vendor billing department better than your vendor's client strategy team?

This means they might need more capacity. It may have nothing to do with outgrowing your vendor – sometimes, it means you have outgrown your contract. If you think that might be the case, revisit the contract together. If you feel the real issue is capacity and their ability to service your account, it's time to move on. 

Experiencing most of these signs?

Your choice of an IT support partner is one of the most critical business decisions you’ll make. It not only affects the efficiency and productivity of every single employee. It affects your company's success. 

Your managed IT vendor is a leveraged component of your business. It should make things easier, better, and faster than if you were attempting IT support, management, security, and strategy internally.

Choosing the right IT partner

Bottom line: If there are more symptoms of outgrowing your managed IT provider than you can count on one hand, it’s probably time to move on. Choose a vendor that will help you and your business thrive. There are lots of benefits to upgrading your IT-managed service provider.

Don’t take risks with your IT. For more than 20 years, Endsight has been an award-winning IT support provider. Get started today.

Tech support issues? Don’t know what’s really going on? Get a free assessment from Endsight and find out how we can help you thrive.