Can we fix it? Yes, we can

I don’t know any IT support chief who doesn’t want to be known for providing excellent levels of service and customer care. We certainly set out to amaze our customers with the quality of our service when we founded The PC Support Group.

So it’s frustrating to know that the thousands of IT support companies around the UK generally have one thing in common – they are renowned for poor service. And this is highly damaging for organisations that place IT service at the crux of their business offering.

The traditional break/fix business model that most IT support companies still employ and stubbornly refuse to move away from is the main cause.

It is a reactionary model where the support company responds only when the customer's equipment fails, when the network goes down, or when software programs are not working properly.

But having to rely on a reactive, rather than proactive, model means you will forever be 'fire-fighting' - something that can be time-consuming and wreak havoc with work scheduling.

This might also leave you unable to focus on creating additional revenue from your existing customer base, let alone win new business. Without the time for marketing and business development your company is going to end up suffering.

Also, growing your business with a break/fix model also means scaling up your staff, your premises, and number of site visits. This can be expensive.

In recent years, the break/fix model of problem solving or ‘fire-fighting’ has become less profitable as well as less predictable, making it hard for companies to grow whilst still offering good customer service.

Increasing costs have shrunk profit margins and added unhappy customers.

As IT service organisations we really only want to offer one service. Yet we want to remove all our customer’s worries and concerns about their computers and anything that communicates with, runs on, or connects to them.

The adoption of an IT automation platform has enabled us to manage and deliver IT support services across our entire customer base remotely, easily and efficiently through a single, integrated web-based platform.

Any issues from a minor configuration problem on a single PC to the planning, installation and maintenance of the IT infrastructure of a building can quickly and easily be remedied.

Constant monitoring and alerting also means problems can often be spotted the moment they occur. This keeps PCs operating optimally.

The PC Support Group can place a support agent on every customer PC and server, to enable it to monitor, manage and control the system remotely.

This allows it to schedule and carry out routine housekeeping tasks such as security patches and operating system updates quickly and easily, reducing potential problems and freeing staff for other roles.

The PC Support Group can monitor its customers' networks, scan for problems and correct them before they affect the computer system.

It can remotely deploy software patches, provide preventative maintenance, and manage the entire inventory on the network without having to return to the customer's location.

We believe our customers are experiencing 25 per cent fewer problems with their IT. Furthermore, the traditional break/fix model achieves at best 50 per cent engineer productivity and because we fix 90 per cent of issues remotely, engineer productivity can double.

Our customers have also confirmed that managed services work for them.

By automating our IT service, we’ve been able to open local franchised offices throughout the UK, using a central platform for all IT service management and delivery across the entire business to maintain high levels of service.

Philip Bird is co-founder of IT services company The PC Support Group