As with any vendor-provided service, some companies do a better job than others even though you might pay exactly the same price. You’ll have to talk with multiple managed network services providers before you find one that meets your needs at a price that works for you.
As you go through the process, though, make sure you avoid these mistakes:
1. Focusing Way Too Much on Price: You generally don’t want to go with the cheapest bidder…ever. Yes, they can get you the price you want. And they might promise you the moon when it comes to service types and quality provided.
However, in reality, they have to cut corners somewhere on their end, which actually reduces your quality of service. Employees may be asked to spend fewer hours providing your services. Some may not get performed at all. They may also be asked to work faster, which causes more mistakes. Price is important, but don’t make a low price your primary concern.
2. Not Giving Managed IT Service Providers Enough Accurate Information to Bid Your Service: Your company will save money if you give your service provider close enough information, right? And you get another benefit: you don’t have to ask your own IT teams to audit and provide data regarding all your resources.
These benefits only last very short-term. Eventually, your managed services provider learns the exact size of your network. And in the meantime, you might wonder why they aren’t serving your network as efficiently as they should be.
Give them the most accurate data you have up-front so you don’t have to deal with the issues again later on down the road. If your statistics are far off enough, you might even have to renegotiate the bid…another agonizingly long process.
3. Forgetting to Set Clear Objectives: Managed IT services always provide more value if you know what you want to get from them before actually finding a vendor. Your objectives could be as simple as finding an outsourced option so you don’t have to do the work.
Or, you might want to reduce costs by 10%, move all of your data storage to the cloud, or cut the number of repairs you have to make in a year by 50%. Whatever your objectives are, set them beforehand and communicate them clearly to your service vendor.
Yes, some of these business mistakes sound rather simple and like they shouldn’t happen. But, they do happen sometimes. The more you can do to avoid them, the better relationship you have with your managed IT services provider!
