What an incredible year. Fuel prices soaring and the government going into meltdown all to frequently.
Even taking the results of Octobers Mini Budget out of the equation, inflation is running at 10% or more.
Now more than ever we need to ensure that IT support is cost effective and valuable.
Does your supplier have a CRM system that can work out how many times you have called? Work out where the bottlenecks and unreliable parts of your network are?
The best way to make sure your IT support is being proactive and helping build your business is to use the facts.
Why not ask your existing IT provider for this information, or better still why not have a coffee with one of the Andisa team to get some free pointers and a list of key questions / metrics to look for. Even if you are not one of our customers we would welcome having a conversation to see if there is a way we can help you with your existing supplier.
Knowing the right question to ask can be really powerful, even if you only partly understand the answer.
For instance questions such as:
- How many times have we called you this period?
- What is the total number of hours spent looking after our network?
- What do we most often call about?
- Do we have hourly / monthly / annual bills? I need to understand my full IT cost.
As an example we recently reviewed a cost spreadsheet for a future client. There was a quarterly charge for phone system support on it. To us that meant there should have been monthly call costs and line rental charges most likely from the same supplier. It turned out that they were paying those but they came from a different supplier name at the same address! As a result they were hidden and not understood.
There was a line on the invoice called “engineering contingency”. It seems that although they paid £20k a year for support, when an engineer had to visit the contingency was also consumed.
Now the last time an engineer visited was 8 months ago and after 45 days the contingency was written off.
By asking the right question and understanding the excesses in the contract they have avoided an increase this year.
If you are concerned about IT cost then why not buy us a coffee and have a free chat about it?
Here is a link to an interesting article about current inflation trends
United Kingdom Inflation Rate – September 2022 Data – 1989-2021 Historical (tradingeconomics.com)
