Overcome the fears of switching support

Please note: This post was written by Highlander prior to their rebrand to FluidOne Business IT - Sheffield.

We know how daunting onboarding to a completely new support provider can be. Essentially putting the wellbeing of your entire IT estate into someone else’s hands, it’s only natural to feel nervous about such a big change. But big change can lead to big benefits, and if done right, making the switch could help you realise considerable cost savings, superior customer service, and greater flexibility than ever before. We believe that every business is entitled to great support, so are constantly developing our onboarding process to ensure the path to our services is seamless, simple, and secure.

Here are our six simple steps to outstanding support:

Before you’ve even started your support contract, we’re making your life easier. Almost as soon as you’ve engaged with us, we send out dedicated Commercial and Technical Account Managers to your site to get to know you, your business, and your existing support offering a bit better. One of our engineers will then conduct a full site survey and take a snapshot of how your network currently looks, identifying any areas that are no longer fit-for-purpose, need replacing, or can be reconfigured. We’ll then present a set of recommendations back to you detailing how we intend to resolve these issues – all so that you can be support-ready prior to your contract start. When you’re ready to go, we establish the optimum time to begin your support contract, for both you and our engineers. Once we’ve got a firm date in mind, we start the process of seizing the contract you have in place with your current provider ready for us to take over.

No two of our support contracts are the same. That’s because we understand that every business needs something different from its support, so work closely with you to ensure our services are tailored to your unique requirements. Whether you only need us during working hours, or else require our team to be available around the clock, we’ll create a support plan bespoke to you. What’s more, prior to your start date, any areas of concern we identified in step one will be planned in for resolution so that you can be sure your IT is performing at its very best when we take it on. We’ll then visit you on-site for the official handover, and request any access information we need in order to get everything implemented and your contract started as soon as we can.

Importantly, we ensure that every relevant department within Highlander responsible for your support is brought up to speed on all of the key information surrounding your business and your individual support needs. Before your contract is underway, we’ll ask you for full lists of your users to integrate into our ERP tool, NetSuite, making certain any calls you have with us are immediately logged against the right person. Our Service Desk is then sufficiently prepped to identify who all of your key users are, so in the event that we need to obtain any authorisation during a support call, they know exactly who to go to, resulting in a timely resolution. We also like to know who we’re speaking to so that we can build a proper relationship with your team. We’re not nameless, faceless answering machines, but real people who really care about doing the best job we can for you.

When we’re happy that everyone is fully in the know, our engineers put together a site information document specific to your environment that gets handed to our Service Desk Team Leaders. The document ensures that no critical details have been missed should a support call come in – that way, you know that every time you speak to one of the team you’re speaking to an informed expert aware of all the ins and outs of your business. We also take the time to look into the status of your renewals, whether that’s your licensing, anti-virus, backup software, or anything else due for renewal on a regular basis and take over the control of these so that your team no longer needs to worry about keeping everything up-to-date. We do it all for you.

We know all too well the value of strong security, especially with the number of cyberattacks still on the rise. That’s why we install intelligent monitoring software onto every one of our support customers’ servers. We constantly monitor your business’ backups and hardware for any failures, disk space issues, or downtime, seeing us able to react quickly and efficiently to get you back up and running again in no time. We’ve become so good at it that you’ll often never notice any change at all.

Before you know it, you’re onboard and your support is in full swing. All that’s left is to sit back and let us do our thing. Then, one month down the line, we’ll conduct an internal review to assess the success of your support so far and identify any patterns or issues within all of your logged calls to see if there is any room for improvement. Depending on your preference, we’re also more than happy to conduct a review with you and your team too.

Changing to a new support partner can be nerve-wracking, but we do this every day. We’re used to working with businesses large and small, IT team or no IT team – whatever your circumstances, we’ve got you covered. We know the right questions to ask and are already prepared for the potential problems we might encounter along the way. Our reputation was built on exceptional support, and as a result, we’ve mastered how to make the onboarding process as easy and as painless as possible.