The Future of IT Support

Introduction In our opinion IT Support for Small and Medium Business is about to undergo a major change in the way it is delivered to customers. With the availability of reliable affordable broadband we are seeing the role of the IT Support Provider converging with the Internet Service Provider to give Small and Medium Business more value than they are currently getting from separate IT Support and Internet Service Providers. We believe that this change will provide a far higher level of support for this market and at the same drive down their support costs. Current Situation To understand the changes that are underway, we really need to have a look how many Small to Medium Businesses currently handle their IT Support. In our experience the vast majority of customers under 50 users that don't have their own internal IT staff are being serviced by individual IT contractors that are typically operating alone without other staff members and with very little infrastructure to support their operations. Australian Bureau of Statistics suggests that 85% of Small and Medium businesses are being serviced by these individuals. In our opinion IT Support is still a cottage industry characterized by one man bands with little training or qualifications, standards or process. This has resulted in what we call the "PC Guy" syndrome (some of this may start to sound familiar), where a business is reliant on a single external contractor to support their IT operations. This is fine when first starting out, as the "PC Guy" gives great personalised service during the early stages of the relationship. Where this starts to cause issues for the SMB is when the "PC Guy" takes on a few more customers and starts to lose the ability to service them all in a timely manner. Typically operating from home or by mobile phone the PC Guy is constantly running from one customer site to another, they may have had formal training at some stage, but many of them have simply started computing as a hobby which has lead to them becoming reasonably proficient at desktop support. Some of them make the jump to becoming proper support businesses with the infrastructure and staff to support networks, however most remain in the single person reactive mode, and as such most of their customers are put in the same position. Many of them end up going back to full time employment when they run out of energy or customers. What we typically find when we go into a new customer site, is a network that has grown as rapidly as the business, but quite often without the same level of planning or systematic approach. Many times we have been called in to fix networks that are struggling to support the business and are constantly in crisis mode. The main complaints we hear when going into a new customer is that they say their "PC Guy" Doesn't really have the level of expertise they need and therefore spends a lot of time learning on the job at the customers expense. Can never get to their site when they need them and therefore have difficulty getting issues solved in a timely manner. They need to go out on-site for the vast majority of problems and bill accordingly i.e. 1-2 hours minimum plus traveling time. When they go on holidays or are ill, there is no one to back them up and the customer has to try to fix it themselves or get someone else. They are constantly lurching from one crisis to another and always in reactive mode with problems coming up that were easily foreseeable. Over the last few years as we were building the IT Support area of our business one of the key issues I foresaw was an issue with scalability of the IT Services and Support business model for Small and Medium Businesses. It seemed to me that unless we could work out someway to handle support for a large number of customers very efficiently and quickly we could never get the scale and efficiency required to build a significant business. I looked at some of the issues with running business in the "PC Guy" model and realised that they lacked both the infrastructure and processes to turn from self employed contractors into real businesses that could provide repeatable high quality support to many customers. After much thought on the issue I realised that the two main enemies of both the customer and the "PC Guy" was the onsite visit and taking a reactive approach to supporting their customers. Out of the all the things that IT Support companies did this these were the most inefficient. Firstly if the customer is more than walking distance you waste at least an hour of traveling time. This made it more expensive for the customer who partially paid for this but still left an unrecoverable amount that the support company had to absorb. Many times, you needed to bill an hour to recover the costs of going out on-site even for a very short job. Likewise if you waited until there were problems instead of taking a proactive consultative approach, you spent your time fighting fires and rescuing customers which is always more wasteful and expensive than handling things in a planned manner. Two years ago Nicholls-Price put a lot of research and development time into finding ways to reduce this wasted time using both monitoring/alert systems and remote management systems. Recently we have added to this by creating the Nicholls-Price Proactive Account Management Plan that identifies areas of our customers networks that need attention and bringing these to the attention of our new customers. As a result of this work, we implemented a number of Network Management tools that monitored our customers networks to provide a Proactive capability that was beyond the capability of the PC Guy and would allow us to more efficiently service our customers and provide a faster response time. These Network Management tools gave us two things that were important to our customers: The ability to proactively know that customers are experiencing a problem with their network, often before they have realised and to proactively do something about it for them. The ability to remotely connect to the network server/router/PC and to be able to make changes or carry out fault finding work to ascertain the problem in real time without having to send an engineer out on site to fault find. I will give two real examples of customer problems and the conversation the customer "would" have had with a PC Guy and the actual conversations they had with us. Example 1."PC Guy" Way Situation: Customer has just hired a new employee to replace an employee who has just left the company and needs to get the old staff member deleted and the new one setup. PC Guy: I can get there tomorrow afternoon or Thursday morning. Customer: But my new staff member has just started I can't get them working until I have them setup on the network. PC Guy: I can try to talk you through this on the server Customer: I don't have access to the server and don't really feel comfortable doing this. PC Guy gets out on site in 1-2 days time, spends 20 minutes doing the job then bills for at least an hour and also bills for traveling time. Total Cost $150-200 plus new employees wasted time. Nicholls-Price Way Situation: Customer has just hired a new employee to replace an employee who has just left the company and needs to get the old staff member deleted and the new one setup. Nicholls-Price Engineer: Bear with me a moment while I remotely log onto your server. Ok, who has left the company and who is replacing them? Customer: Bob Smith has left and John Jones is replacing him. Nicholls-Price Engineer: Bob Smiths account has now been disabled on your server. Do you want any incoming email for him diverted to your account? We have just created a new user for John Jones, here is his password, this has been set so that he will need to change this immediately when he logs on. His email address is jjones@xyzcorp.com.au and his email password is xxxx. Get John to log on, ok enter your name and password in Outlook. Your account and email is now setup. Is there anything else that I can help you with today? Customer: Great thanks very much, see you later. All of this happens in real time from when a customer calls. Also as we didn't need to send out an engineer on site we have been more efficient with our engineers time saving us and the customer money. The result. The customer gets a bill for 15 minutes of support time, a saving of an hour or more, which over the period of a year of support work provides a significant saving to the customer. Problem solved immediately. Total Cost $37 Example 2. "PC Guy" Way Situation: Customer can't get access to email and the internet. Customer: Hi, my internet connection isn't working and I have important email to send. PC Guy: It's probably your Huge ISP DSL connection. Call your Huge ISP and get them to fix it. Customer: Hi Huge ISP, my internet connection isn't working, Huge ISP: Everything is OK here, sounds like there is a problem with your network or server talk to your PC Guy. Customer: I have and he said it is your problem. Huge ISP: No problems on our end, definitely your network. Customer (with extreme frustration in voice): I can't seem to find anyone to take responsibility, everyone is pointing the finger at someone else and I cant send this email. Customer spends the day in frustration without connection until the PC Guy can come onsite and fault find. (gets billed for 1-2 hours and travel time). Internet mysteriously starts working with no conclusive proof as to the problem. Total Cost $200 plus lost productivity Nicholls-Price Way Situation: Customer cant get access to email and the internet. Nicholls-Price Engineer: Proactively calls Customer; Hi Barry, we just got an alert that shows there is a problem with your network and your router isn't responding. Can you please let me know if you have been experiencing any problems with power, phones or your network equipment. Customer: Oh... (surprised), thanks for your call, no, we just noticed we couldn't get to the internet a few moments ago. Nicholls-Price Engineer: Could I please get you to check if your Router has Power and CD lights and if your Server has power. A few moments pass...... Customer: (with grin on face) Looks like someone kicked out the power pack for our router, I have plugged it in and the lights have come back on. (don't laugh this is an actual conversation on Friday night before a long weekend earlier in the year with one of our customers). Nicholls-Price Engineer: Yes, we can see it has just come back up on our Network Monitor. Can you access the internet now? Customer: Yes, it seems to be fine, thanks very much for your help. Customer didn't receive any support billing for this at all, it was included as fault finding on their Nicholls Price DSL service. Total Cost $0 A few points to note from these examples: Until we started providing remote support, customers didn't actually realise that there was an alternative way of solving their IT problems and Nicholls-Price Proactive Support service is faster and cheaper than the old alternative. Our engineers estimate that more than 80% of the problems we solve are being completed by remote management or phone without visiting the customer. Therefore the customer is only being billed for a fraction of the time that they would have if they had an onsite visit. When your IT Support provider has control and is responsible for your DSL line, Server and router, problem solving is much quicker and easier and therefore less costly for you. We are now doing this for customers around the country and in one case for a customer with a site in the UK and the USA that don't want to go through the effort of hiring a support company for their small branch office. Using these techniques we have managed to fully pre-configure whole networks of PCs, Servers and Routers and ship them interstate, plug them in and they start operating and run full remote support on them after that. The conclusion that we have reached is that the value created for our customers by getting DSL, Remote IT Support, Proactive Management from one company is far greater than the value they get from the individual services and products purchased independently. To make it easier for our customers we have implemented a new combined Proactive Support Bundle which includes Proactive Server Management to identify problems and a 512k Business Grade DSL connection starting for $250 per month. We estimate that this will save the average 10 person network more than $200 per month in onsite support calls. Conclusion Our predictions are that over the next few years, ourselves and other companies with similar philosophies will take over a lot of the customers that the PC Guys look after as their customers IT infrastructure matures and their requirements increase beyond what the PC Guy can deliver. We envisage that Support Providers such as ourselves will consolidate the market to 5-10 main competitors covering more than 50% of the SME market and drive out the "PC Guys" in all but the sub 5 staff market. If you think these services can provide a better solution for your business than what you are currently doing please feel free to call myself, or one of the sales team, to see if these services are suitable for your requirements. How to contact Nicholls-Price Sales: sales@nph.com.au Support: support@nph.com.au You can log both support calls and sales enquiries at our Website http://www.nph.com.au Or call us in Australia on (02) 9222 9155