Outsourcing IT services is an excellent way for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to enjoy enterprise-grade business solutions at a fraction of the cost of doing it in-house. Even the largest corporations partner up with managed IT service providers (MSPs) to optimize their IT spending and focus on their own value proposition.
IT is simply the means to corporate ends. If your MSP in Toronto is not delivering the results you desire, you must cut your losses and find another one that will. While it can be difficult to know exactly when you should do this, there are often telltale signs that indicate it might be worthwhile to hire a new managed IT services provider. Here are a few of them:
Is Your Current MSP Responsive?
Without question, if your MSP in Toronto was not delivering on promises for major initiatives like adding a new security protocol or onboarding 100 new users, you'd be unhappy and start looking for a new managed IT services provider.
However, very often it’s the everyday requests that start to fall through the cracks: new drivers for a printer, software patches, password resets, slower than expected network performance. It's these kinds of service requests that are insidious: individually, you and your staff can live without a response another day or even another week, but over time, these problems can begin to snowball and affect overall personal and company performance.
Frustration sets in, and you begin to see the signs: employee/user complaints, customer complaints, temporary workarounds in business processes, missed deadlines or objectives, gaps in reporting, maybe even a spike in viruses or malware. And even worse, your staff eventually just stops calling for support, taking away your ability to track the issue while they spend time resolving the same IT problems themselves.
If productivity, performance, and security are beginning to be impacted, it's time to act and make your move to a new managed IT services provider with proven processes, facilities, and personnel to respond to your IT needs in a timely way.
Is Your MSP Frequently Pushing Their Sales Agenda?
Every business has its own objectives—nobody can fault entrepreneurs for that. However, be wary when your managed IT services provider starts pitching you services that have an unclear impact on your bottom line. That provider may just be looking to meet sales quotas instead of actually providing value to your business.
A trustworthy service provider actively aligns managed IT solutions to business objectives. They are not afraid to tell you, “No, you don’t need this particular item yet because it doesn’t fit your current business model,” even though that item would have added a significant amount to their billables.
To evaluate your IT MSP in Toronto, consider the following:
- Have you subscribed to multiple IT services or packages with a lot of add-ons, only to end up not using some of those services or add-ons at all? If so, you might be a victim of bloated billables.
- Is your MSP in Toronto resistant to exploring other third-party vendors besides the ones they’ve already pitched?
- Has your MSP recommended that staff, teams, or departments use different applications or platforms and promises to tie everything together with customization-heavy integrations? The cost of such integrations can balloon fast, especially since incompatibilities can always give rise to bugs (e.g., process malfunctions) that always need fixing. That means excess revenue for the MSP at your expense. You’re better off with an IT MSP in Toronto that streamlines processes instead of complicating them.
- Are you anxious about bill shock? Do you dread finding out how much you are going to pay because of bill item bloat or larger-than-expected line-item costs?
If you answered “yes” to most of the questions, then you should seriously consider working with a new managed IT services provider.
Do They Have Enough IT Infrastructure to Support Your Business?
Businesses are like plants: some are only meant to go so high, while others are meant to tower over everything around them. If your firm is the latter type, you’ll need an IT MSP in Toronto that can grow with you.
Inquire about the capacity of their data centres—can they scale and ensure data security as you grow your business? Look at how big their clients are, as well as the scale of the projects they’ve done—are they as ambitious as yours? Also, review their network of third-party vendors—do they have a broad enough range of managed IT solutions in Toronto to suit your expansion requirements?
If the answer to any of those questions is no, then find another provider.
Does Your IT Managed Service Provider Have Internal Strife?
Normally, clients are assigned account managers. By exercising intimate knowledge of client-provider relationships, the latter handles service agreements with the former.
As a client, you have every right to be concerned if you’re assigned a new account manager. That person needs to become acquainted with everything you’ve done with the MSP and know by heart your preferences and processes in a short amount of time.
At best, your old account manager got promoted or went for a horizontal career shift within the company. At worst, your provider may be suffering a high turnover rate during a season of turmoil and uncertainty.
Clear indicators of strife within an MSP in Toronto can be found in the quality of service and results it delivers. If trouble tickets are piling up higher than normal, or data breaches are on the rise, or service deliverables are taking longer to be fulfilled, then it is most likely that the provider is going through some internal issues, making it unreliable. Whatever the reason for their poor service, you’ll need to start looking for a new managed IT services provider in Toronto that’s more consistent and poses no risk of stalling your business.
Is Your Managed IT Service Provider Working for You?
At some point, if you’re dissatisfied with the services you’re receiving then it’s your right and responsibility to start questioning the motives of your IT MSP in Toronto immediately. Are they really interested in helping you grow your business or are they just looking out for their own bottom line?
The proof is always in the pudding. Take the time to review your past service performance and analyze data based on services rendered. If your managed IT services provider does not provide dashboards, live reports, or aggregated data, then at best they’re not providing you the transparency and value you deserve, and at worse they may be hiding something from you. Either way, that’s when you know it’s time to cut your losses and hire a new managed IT services provider immediately.
Have You Noticed Any Progress?
If you’ve been with the same IT MSP in Toronto for a long time and you’re not seeing any positive progress, then it’s definitely time to get a new and more qualified provider. Are they consistently meeting their SLAs (Service Level Agreements)? Are they clearing tickets in a timely and effective way? Are they treating your staff with dignity and respect? Can they provide Professional Services for new projects within budgets and in a timely way?
If you’re more than six months into your contract with your MSP and the growth in these areas has been minimal or even regressing, then cutting your losses early makes more sense.
Why Choose XBASE Technologies as a Preferred Managed Service Provider in Toronto?
If you have concerns about the quality of service delivered by your current MSP, talk to XBASE Technologies. As a leading managed IT services provider in Toronto since 1988, we serve all local business sectors to provide “Exponentially Better™” solutions for our clients. (Don’t take our word for it hear it from customers directly). Providing both on-premise and cloud-based IT services, we can help protect your small business from cyberattacks, improve your IT infrastructure’s performance, and empower your staff to get the most out of the technology they use every day. Feel free to give us a call at Call (416) 340-1020 or email us at sales@xbase.com.