It just strikes me that at The PC Support Group we speak to businesses and home users daily who come to us with horror stories of their current or previous computer support provider. I don’t suppose that accountants, lawyers, financial advisors, designers and other professionals have anything like the same torrent of tales of woe. Why is this?
I think one of the biggest problems is that the computer support market has undervalued itself. What I mean by this is that thousands of barely qualified (or not qualified at all) people have started offering IT support services at ridiculously low prices. I recently came across someone offering computer support for £15 per hour which, when you consider they will not be paid for the time they travel, market, sell and do their administration, is not far from minimum wage!
Unsurprisingly, low prices attract custom but the service quality is invariably equally low. Low prices means that those IT support businesses can’t afford to employ skilled people, they can’t afford to invest in the best support technology, and they can’t afford to invest in training to keep up to date with technological changes. The result is that computer support businesses, and in particular “one man bands”, have created an undervalued industry with an appalling service record.
The other major problem is that the computer support industry is generally hopeless at communicating to the rest of the world. Apart from this resulting in technicians bamboozling their customers, it has also resulted in customers not understanding the value of great IT support.
For example, a high quality business backup solution which guarantees to restore all the data exactly as it was and make it available within a day might cost a few hundred pounds a month. Many small businesses will simply refuse to pay this sort of money for something that seemingly sits there doing nothing. The irony is that if they had one major problem every 3 years (which is likely) then this would more than pay for itself and could even save the business from closure.
The problem is that most IT support companies struggle to get this argument across effectively and then get the fall out when the business can’t operate – yet again they are seen to provide a poor service.
At The PC Support Group we constantly strive to make sure we offer the best service at the best value for money. We have numerous examples where potential customers choose the “cheap” provider only to find that within 12 months they are back saying “You were right, the service was awful and we’ve had all sorts of problems. When can you come and see us.”
It is time for the IT support industry to be stronger and focus on providing great service at a value for money price instead of being cheap and providing bad service. This approach is ultimately the best thing for our customers and will raise the reputation of the industry as a whole.