Support made easy for the small companies and end users.
Help Desk and Remote Support
Concept
A simple idea but very hard to understand the value. Many customers have purchased these types of programs from “Big Vendors” and “Box Stores”. The program is simple you pay a fee for the year and when you need help you call their 800 number and they help you. If the concept is so easy why is it that so many customers end up in our shop and are not willing to contact the “Help Desk” vendor.
Communications
Not being able to communicate with the customer. This is one of the most critical issues and while I am not perfect at it I have had some experience between 10 years in retail and over 30 years in Computers/IT and Consulting. Even here though it is some time hard not to be more technical than your customer can handle. But communications for some of our competitors also means verbal skills. Many customers have complained that they do not understand their help desk provider because of language and regional issues. This part of our business has been over commoditized and off-shored for the benefit of cheap labor. Many stories exist about call centers moving to other areas of the world. Advantage is they do bring in money in areas that may need it but it is at the expense of other areas where labor is more expensive.
Experience
Larger call centers are going to have a wider range of experienced individuals from good to bad and on technologies not all small provider may be able to cover. The trade here though is for personal care. We are run a smaller support operation growing as our client base grows. Our focus though is on individual and desktop support. Most of my clients our on a first name basis and were part of my break fix organization before the came on board our Service Plans. Some clients are out of state, this is not a new concept but the issue comes up because people want to know what happens when we have to put boots on the ground and be on-site for the customer. We participate in several networks of support staff across the country. This relationship helps us shore up our technology weaknesses and also makes it possible to have staff in multiple places at once. But our main goal is that our immediate staff is working on the issues first.
Cost
Large help desks for individuals is often inexpensive but as state above you sometimes get what you pay for. Many companies want to be your everything provider using in-house solutions but may introduce single point of failure. We try to utilize different solutions and vendors to assist in mitigating risks and minimizing down time and crisis for our clients. Our service is more of a concierge service so we are not the least expensive on the market. Our belief is that if we are priced fair and our clients recognize the value of our service then we are priced correctly. We do not want to have the entire world as our customer, that would be insane. Many providers for the individuals will start out in the low $20.00 range and go up from there based on the number of computers and the type of client load. On the business side it is not unusual to see prices start between $50-75 for a workstation and go up from there.
Target
As state our target for remote support is in the small business and individual user. We do have larger clients and are willing to take on that type of business, But, we believe there are a lot of customers that wish they had services like the corporations but setup for a smaller target. Many MSPs we have seen are leaving small clients behind and thus creating a wake of users needing more. We hope we can provide that for our clients and future clients.
If you would like to discuss your individual needs so we can see if needs are a fit for our company give us a call at 727-943-2406 or email us at support@end2endsupport.com
