1. You are happy to just focus on customers who don’t need out-of-hours (OOH) support
OK – but the pool of companies that just needs cover from 9 to 5 is shrinking, with extended business hours becoming the norm particularly around peak work periods.
And while your customers may be based in the same country as you, their networks may be being accessed from overseas offices and by employees travelling internationally. What happens when support is needed in another time zone?
Plus, your competitors will be very happy that you are not offering 24/7/365 support – it leaves the field clear for them.
2. Not all of your customers need 24/7, so you can manage with the team you have and just give them a mobile phone to cover out-of-hours
That’s a possibility of course, and if your people don’t want to do the graveyard shifts, you can just let them go – after all, there’s never a problem in finding skilled engineers to join your company.
Plus, as a back-up, you wouldn’t mind being permanently attached to a mobile phone and covering extended hours yourself if necessary.
I mean, it can’t be that difficult, can it?
3. You are planning to set up your own fully-fledged 24/7 NOC
That’s great, but be prepared for a lot of hard work, significant capital outlay, a big investment in management time and ongoing operational expense – not to mention a whole heap of HR worry to find and retain the right staff to work a 24/7shift pattern.
4. You don’t mind playing catch-up the next day when an issue has cropped up out of hours
You may not mind it, but your customers will almost certainly object if downtime impacts their working day while you are trying to resolve the situation.
5. You are not losing any business by not offering 24/7 support
Are you absolutely sure about this?
Your competitors may already be discussing the benefits of 24/7/365 support with your clients; pointing out how it enables them to be more responsive to issues when they do occur – and more proactive in avoiding them altogether, or at least detecting them early enough for a quick resolution outside of the normal working day.
6. You still have the bandwidth to offer new in-demand services
And bear in mind too that the time/effort spent by your team in resolving Tier 1 issues and responding to routine customer requests out-of-hours, could be more profitably spent if channelled into providing higher value services to customers in areas like security and BDR.
Joking aside, an increasing number of MSPs are realising the benefits of partnering for 24/7/365 NOC and Service Desk. Here’s what some of them have to say.
“Inbay has allowed us to significantly enhance the level of service offered to our client base and given me piece of mind that a competent set of hands are on the tiller when my own engineers are done for the day.”
Adam Doblo, CIO, Adaptive Solutions, Inc.
“The problem we had was getting qualified technical staff who wanted to work the graveyard shift monitoring servers and responding to alerts on critical devices the 11 hours a day we weren’t working.”
Eric Rockwell, President, CentrexIT
“The Inbay people are fully capable of looking after our infrastructure and our customers’ infrastructures while we are asleep – and telling us when they see something that will need manual intervention from our staff.”
Tim Walker, MD, Taylor Made
“We were finding it very difficult to offer out-of-hours services to clients profitably with our own staff. Inbay offered an alternative route and it’s worked really well.”
Steve Ross, MD, Shackleton Technologies
