In house vs Outsourcing IT Support: Which is The Right Choice for Your Business? When companies find themselves needing to address a specific business need, one question they'll often have...
If you’ve decided that your business will benefit from an outsourced IT Support Service, then now is the time to shop around. But with a vast number of professional IT firms in London to choose from, how do you decide on the best IT Support Service for your business?
As a small business owner (or manager) you are likely to have some reservations about outsourcing your IT department. Perhaps you’re concerned about factors such as the cost, privacy of confidential information, or quality of service. Rightfully so, too.
Your confidence and peace of mind is vitally important. So before you take the plunge, we recommend that you assess your best IT Support Service on some ‘general’ factors. This will help you to judge how suitable individual services are for your growing business.
So here’s the top 7 most important factors for identifying your best IT Support Service:
An IT Service is unlikely to deliver the personalised service they promised you if their personnel frequently changes. High staff turnover almost always negatively impacts the client. Try to seek service with an experienced, stable team of long-term staff.
It’s true that staff come and go -- this isn’t always preventable. But at UK IT Service we invest heavily in developing and retaining our team. We do our utmost to ensure staff are satisfied in their job and aim to help them develop, grow and achieve their personal goals. For example, just last year we launched the 'UK IT Service University', where our engineers attended weekly training sessions on the latest technologies. It proved to be a stimulating and educational experience that helps us all to maintain modern standards.
We carefully manage staff workloads, too. Every client’s requirements are spread across several engineers who act when needed. For each customer ‘site’, we allocate at least one primary engineer and one cover engineer (depending on site size). We also involve team leaders -- who are high level engineers themselves -- that overlook and manage other engineers.
Essentially, the best IT Support Services value their own staff. And we do our best to maintain continuity -- as well as progression -- within our IT team.
It goes without saying that you need to search for a competitively priced IT Service. Just be careful not to rush in unprepared, whilst being lured by the prospect of ‘saving money’. So what exactly is value for money in the IT Service industry?
At UK IT Service we believe that a fairly priced, responsive, director-led service defines value. Our leaders are involved with all clients right from our initial meeting, during the quotation agreement, right through the day-to-day support. Your business is unique and therefore requires a personalised, efficient, hands-on approach at all levels.
We deal with small companies based in London where all types of business are highly competitive. There’s no room to make promises that we can't keep -- so we’re 100% honest about what we offer. Our overall aim is to help small companies to thrive and grow through our IT support and solutions.
We’ve helped many individuals to achieve their business goals, which is something we take enormous pride in. We aren’t looking for a 'quick cash' deal by recruiting new customers. We’re here for the long run. Building strong and mutually beneficial business relationships has been our ethos since 1999.
Currently, we’re offering a generous introductory promotion for new clients, giving one month's free service when signing up for 12 months. To learn more about our current offers and pricing structures, please contact us here.
Trust is one of the most important aspects of building a strong relationship with your IT provider. This is gained once a service demonstrates their ability to competently perform all of the tasks required to a high standard, whilst simultaneously maintaining the privacy of your data or ‘trade secrets’.
The best IT Support Services will prove their competence with time. Loss or protection of institutional knowledge -- the private information relating to your business -- need not be a huge concern if your chosen service has a solid track record, with a team of professional, experienced staff with credentials to back up their capabilities.
At UK IT Service we recognise that your trust is earned by us. We encourage you to meet us face to face, to discuss your specific requirements, and to put water-tight agreements in place. Our aim is to ensure that you are both clear and confident in which direction we’re heading together.
Decide on the level of control you want to maintain over your IT before signing up to any service. This varies for every business, and it might depend on your company’s level of technological expertise.
It’s important to note that with UK IT Service you aren’t somehow ‘surrendering’ any control over your business. On the contrary, you opt to relieve some responsibilities to us -- nothing more. Whilst we support and manage your IT systems, you always maintain full control of it. The best IT Support Services work this way.
It’s our primary job, above all else, to make sure that your systems are up and running as smooth as possible. We ensure the continuity of your business, and view ourselves as your ‘IT Manager’. So we’ll always look to provide help and advice -- such as suggested improvements -- in all areas that we see potential ways of improving your business through technology.
Exposure of sensitive data can be detrimental to your business, and in breach of data protection laws. Systems and procedures must be employed to ensure that your data is well protected.
UK IT Service deals with high profile systems and data on a daily basis. Thus we strive to protect ourselves and our clients. We take data protection very seriously and thoroughly educate all of our staff and clients on safe data protection processes.
Data protection and legal compliance is a very 'hot' topic right now -- particularly as the new EU GDPR enforcement comes into place on 25th May 2018. At UK IT Service we’ve made all the necessary adjustments to ensure that we’re up to date. In fact, the GDPR is so heavily related to IT, that we also helped several of our customers to prepare for the change, too. In addition, we’ve recently begun the process of obtaining an ISO9001 and ISO27001 certification.
Note that all of our employees are DBS checked. This process highlights convictions and conditional cautions that are considered outside of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. See our full list of accreditation here.
You should expect rapid response times from your IT service, regardless of whether a fault involves hardware or software. Unwanted delays and disruptions could, however, be caused in cases where physical responses are required onsite. A locally based service is therefore preferable to some businesses.
UK IT Service predominantly provides IT Support for London-based companies, where we’re able to rapidly respond to physical faults, as well as perform system upgrades. By maintaining high standards both remotely and onsite, we’ve established long term relationships with local businesses as well as various international clients.
Importantly, our business is driven by customer satisfaction and recommendations. Hence, we won’t take on workloads that our team isn’t capable of committing enough resources to during turbulent periods. That’s why, in the vast majority of cases, we outperform target response times and exceed the agreed SLAs.
Verbal and written communication barriers hinder productivity. Keep this in mind if you’re looking at outsourcing your IT to a firm that:
A. Is based overseas, or
B. Outsources its own staff abroad.
UK IT Service's full time staff are ‘in house’. Naturally, our main language is English -- but our multi-national team also supports clients in several other languages, too. Our help desk is run from the HQ in East London.
To maintain ‘best practices’ our professional staff are frequently trained. This ensures that we consistently provide the highest level of communication to all clients. We strive to be the best IT Support Service possible, in all areas.
You need to feel confident in how you proceed with your business IT outsourcing. Assessing each the above 7 factors is an easy way to identify a suitable support service and avoid common issues later on down the line. But if you have very specific requirements, or still have doubts, then be sure to clarify your uncertainties over the phone, or email.
Our ability to understand and meet the needs of our clients makes us one of the favoured IT Services for many small companies based in London. Could we be the best IT Support Service for you?
We can tailor the IT Support package to fit your needs and budget. For a no-obligation IT audit and quote get in touch today. Send us a message or call 020 3034 1059 and we'll be glad to help.
In house vs Outsourcing IT Support: Which is The Right Choice for Your Business? When companies find themselves needing to address a specific business need, one question they'll often have...
COVID-19: Remote Working for London Businesses - Tools you'll need to Work from Home [Part-2] With the number of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) confirmed cases on the rise in the UK, more...
COVID-19: Remote Working for London Businesses - A Guide to Work from Home [Part-1] With the number of COVID-19 (Coronavirus) confirmed cases on the rise in the UK, more and...
