We were inspired to provide some insight for companies to use, and hopefully benefit from, in their process for finding a quality company to handle their IT services. This blog has been in the works for some time, many years in fact, and is inspired by my work with many Office Administrators and business Owners that have wondered into business relationships they regretted. Yes, we are an IT company, so I understand the conflict of interest in providing this kind of information, but I will try to be as unbiased and transparent as possible for you to make a decision that takes your company to greater heights, whether it is MSP Match that you work with, or another great service provider.
Quick Background
We understand the entire structure of MSP's, top to bottom. We have years of experience with several MSP's and IT providers, from massive datacenters to niche market teams. We can speak to the inefficiencies of these organizations, and so, here we go.....
How to find a GREAT IT company.
No Long Term Contracts
Many IT/MSP companies want you to commit to their services, typically for 1, 2 or 3 year stints. This puts your company at a serious disadvantage, and the industry is chalked full of companies that put safeguards in place to make sure your organization cannot claim breach of contract and leave due to poor or delayed services. Long term contracts are a big red flag, and organizations will provide these multi-year options showing lower monthly costs to incentivize you to sign. Try to work with organizations that believe in their services enough to offer monthly agreements.
Find a company that is close to you
Many service requests can be handled remotely, but there are often times when you need an engineer on site. For example, switches, firewalls, printers, or users with limited understanding of the technology may require hands on assistance. IT companies, like MSP Match, will try to eliminate travel costs and slow response times by working with clients that are close to us. Many IT companies have invested in remote employees and cloud computing technologies post Covid, leaving response times for on site support at poor levels. Your team should be fast, efficient, and available, whether on site or remote. This can be the difference between "within the hour", or "within a few days." If your IT company is not fixing your problems quickly, you are not working. If you are not working, you are losing money, etc. Trust that in this case, you will still be receiving a monthly invoice.
Size Matters
The bigger the better, is not something the service industry is known for. You already know this to be true with all the other vendors in your life. Think about every big company that you have ever purchased services from (ex. Power companies, phone companies, nternet service providers, insurance companies, etc). These organizations are bloated and departmentalized in such a way that prohibits prompt response times, moving at the speed of molasses. Working with Large IT providers like these have proven to be extremely inefficient at servicing growing organizations that require help in real-time. They can't possibly compete with smaller local IT companies that are on the ball. Stay away from the big guys, unless you've got time to kill.
Will the Engineer be joining us??
From the time you start a conversation with a potential IT service provider, you may find that the Account Manager and Senior Manager are the only ones involved through the process. There may be one meeting where the engineer is introduced and brought onto a call, or video meeting, but many times they leave the call early due to other assignments they are dedicated to. If a company cannot spare time for the engineer to listen and learn about your company needs and IT environment in preliminary conversations, how could they possibly have time to facilitate the emergency needs of your company when they arise? In addition, how will they have time to help your organization remediate a widespread cyber attack should it occur across several organizations they manage? Asking these questions early on will save you from headache and heartache.
You should also speak directly to the engineer and see if the engineer engages, speaks clearly about the technology, and takes an interest into your profession. They should ask questions about your workflow, processes and bottlenecks. Maybe they will offer solutions from experience, or look into potential options for those specific problems. It will be a massive benefit if the engineer responds in a personable manner, after all, you will be working directly with this individual going forward during times of frustration. In my experience, engineers that have the time to invest in these meetings show that the company they work for is not overleveraged, and employees are not overworked. These organizations also tend to have minimal human error, and less turnover.
Licensing Management
Software licensing has become a major pain point and revenue loss for many companies, costing hundreds to thousands of dollars annually in unused licenses. As your company loses and gains employees, the cost of subscriptions and managed endpoints (computers) should change as well. Make sure to discuss whom is responsible for maintaining those licenses ahead of time, as overcharges can go on for months before it is caught. . This is an area that potential IT providers should be discussing with you at the onset.
Other things to consider....
Here are some additional miscellaneous items to consider that I have quickly included for the end of this blog. When you receive your IT Service Level Agreement, check the response times listed. You may see 1 to 4 hours for this, 4 to 8 hours for that, 24 to 48 hours for this, etc. Just know that when the company has turnover, which is very typical with large enterprise organizations, you will be receiving the higher number of hours for responses. You will also find that companies with higher turnover shuffle lead engineers constantly. This means that your chances of working with the same engineer are slim to none. In this, you can expect service to continuously be delayed as each new engineer has to learn your specific environment details.
Do your best to understand how licensing works for your needs. Most licenses today are subscription based, offering monthly and yearly terms. In many cases, IT service providers will lock you into annual licensing agreements. If their service level agreement is monthly, but their licensing terms are annual, your service level agreement may as well be annual as you will need to pay those licenses in full before leaving, and most of those are not transferrable.
If your agreement is for cloud services, building your cloud network on AWS, Azure, or another cloud infrastructure, many MSP's offer multi-year discounts. The 3-year discounts are quite palatable, but signing this will put you under a 3 year agreement with the MSP. The only way out of many of these is to make sure that your organization is the owner of the leased cloud services, and you can let the MSP build in your cloud server tenant. If you allow the MSP to build on servers that they lease, you are obligated to those servers and will end up having to pay off the multi-year agreement all at once, as well as having to pay to have your environment rebuilt by the next IT service provider, and yes, I have seen this happen maaaaaaany times.
We hope that this information helps you find a quality partnership, and deters you from potential problems. Good luck on your journey!
MSP Match
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