Great IT service

[John Lawrence]

Like most Ops managers, I’ve come across and dealt with my fair share of IT disasters. I’ve gone the route of hiring an in-house staff, only to realize that it exhausted my budget and half the time I was paying for employees to sit around and wait for a disaster to strike. I’ve also gone the route of hiring an outside company to run my IT support, again only to find that I was being overcharged at every turn and I had no REAL immediate support, more like we were put into a “Queue” and when our number came up then we would get help. Unfortunately this is something my company cannot live with as having our system down for 15 minutes can cost us thousands of dollars in revenue.

My main goal as an Ops manager is to find a cost effective solution to my company’s needs without suffering from quality service. Easier said than done! Even if I hired a guy out of his house (because it would be cheap) to do the work, he would show up days later in flip flops and shorts and never really seemed focused enough to handle our problems. Maybe he just had too many clients to handle all by himself but it was the cheapest solution I could find. None the less the service was unacceptable and in the long run cost me just as much as the large outsourced companies would.

So I have a friend in the travel industry and she tells me to stop hiring IT support and look for IT consultants. What’s the difference right? Well as she explained IT support is there to fix your problems after they happen and pretty much run up the bill. IT Consultants however act as a partner with you by not only providing IT support but by creating preventative measures to ensure you don’t go through the same problems over and over again and find ways to save you money through technology.
My friend gave me the number of a company called The Tech Info Group based here in L.A. that she has worked with for years. I called them up, met with their senior level management, and discussed the issues I have gone through in the past.

Their approach was simple. They would take over my IT department, meaning I no longer had to worry about any more issues concerning technology. From buying printers to installing and negotiating pricing on new computers at a cheaper price, they would handle everything.

Ok so one problem down. Now let’s talk about cost. They explained that they only charge in 15 minute increments not 1 hour blocks. If something only takes them 15 minutes to do then that’s all I get charged for. OK sounds good. They told me about passive billing which means if the technician is working on something for me that takes 4 hours but during that 4 hours he’s also working on another client of theirs too, then I only get charged half the time so 2 hours of work. Great now I’m seeing that they are honest with their clients. Finally we talked about rate. They quoted me $95 an hour whereas I had been paying $150-$200 an hour at other places. I really couldn’t believe how they could afford to charge so little but started to get weary as cheap price usually means bad service.

They explained to me that because most of their work can be done remotely from their home office that they have technicians available 24 hours a day 7 days a week for any of my needs. I was also told that, if for any reason, I needed on-site support, that would also be available 24 hours a day as well.

I wanted to share this story because I have been working with this company now for about 40 days and I’ve never been happier with the type of service I’m receiving and I know it’s very difficult to find reliable support that you can actually afford. My friend was completely correct when she said to go the Tech Consultant route instead of Tech Support. I highly recommend you look into that type of service and save yourself the headaches. Also check out this company Tech Info Group at www.gottig.com