Outsourcing Services | 8 steps to successful Outsourcing | Outsourcing FAQs
IT Outsourcing > Small Business
It is difficult for a small business to justify the salary of a full-time IT person. The cost of an experienced ICT support person is in the region of £35,000 to £50,000 depending upon region. A small business will also not have the workload to justify a full-time position. IT people want to work with latest technology; they have a thirst to try cutting edge technology. This is not always appropriate for your business.
So the net result is that they move on to another position and you are back to square one. Many SME’s choose to outsource IT support as it offers them the benefit of a reliable service that is not reliant on a single person.
IT Outsourcing
When you work in a small business you often have to wear many hats. Typically the Office Manager is thrown all the duties that others cannot perform or don’t want to do. Responsibility for Information Technology (IT) is one of those functions, keeping the office applications and network running and giving IT support to colleagues when they need help with their computer.
Although you work for a small company, your IT services are just as critical to your business as they are essential to a larger company. IT systems are complex and it is unreasonable to expect a single person, such as the office manager or IT support manager, to be able to support, operate, administer and manage your whole companies' needs.
ihotdesk promote outsourcing as the best solution possible for IT support and management for a small business. The Office manager’s role is that of supervision and monitoring performance of the specialist IT support partner.
ihotdesk take responsibility for the day to day running of the computer network, applications and are available to provide support quickly to your employees when they need IT help.
Our comprehensive outsourcing service is available in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Reading, Bristol and Brighton.
We customise the IT support service to meet your specific requirements; we understand that you may have unique needs. The following is an example for a business with thirty people.
What your service could look like by appointing ihotdesk as your trusted ICT partner:
One call to our Helpdesk for any IT support you or your colleagues have. There is no voice mail or telephone options to contend with, you speak to a person who’ll make sure the best person to deal with your query calls you back and gets to a resolution fast.
We are structured in small IT support teams, so you receive a personal service. Whether assistance is provided by telephone support or in person by on-site support you and your colleagues get to know us and we build a relationship with yourselves.
Your business receives unlimited remote and onsite support, so we are driven to provide a proactive service for you. We trust that your people will not abuse the unlimited support we offer. We’re sure they will not call us unless they need our help or advice regarding IT support, we know they want to do is get on with their job and IT to be reliable.
Daily checks of your email system, network servers, backup and internet connection is completed before your office is open. This allows us to remedy any issues before your business day.
Monthly server health checks are another example of our proactive management service. We ensure your servers have the latest security patches and are in a good state of health.
Our all-inclusive service provides you with confidence that you have a fixed price for your IT Support in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Reading, Bristol or Brighton. Our competitors also state they offer ‘all-inclusive’ packages, from experience this rarely includes unlimited on-site IT support.
What additional charges can you expect to be billed for?
Installation of new computers, servers and printers bare an additional charge. Project activities, such as setting up a new office; implementing a home network; upgrading software applications and hardware; updating your web-site; Microsoft application training, are quoted on a fixed basis once we understand your requirements and the scope of the project.
We promise no nasty surprises regarding your billing. If there is going to be an additional charge then we would have quoted you for the work and it would have been pre-authorised by you.
Communications
Your telephone system is just as important to your business as your email system. Just as you cannot be without email, you also cannot be without telephone communication.
Why should you need to speak to another technology company about your telephone system needs when you have an IT company supporting your computer network? ihotdesk have expertise for communications and IT, so we become your trusted single-source provider.
To improve efficiencies within business, companies want to integrate their telephone system with their IT applications. People want to dial a contact from their Microsoft Outlook application; they want in-bound calls to be ‘screen popped’ so people know who are calling and can be show familiarity; companies want other business applications to be integrated with telephony.
Legacy telephone systems don’t typically have the features to allow for the integration with software applications. ihotdesk provide Voice Over IP (voip) telephone systems from Mitel and Avaya. We then configure these so they are integrated with your software applications.
Thereafter we support and maintain the voip telephone system, including the service in an outsourcing contract.
A new voip telephone system can be implemented without capital investment for a small business. You simply say how many handsets you need and we’ll install the new handsets and train your people how to use the new system. You can even have home workers using the voip handsets and act in the same manner as if they were office based.
A new telephone system can be yours for just £X per handset per month (excluding vat).
If you are looking to Outsource all or part of your IT Support in London or throughout the United Kingdom and would like to meet with one of our consultants for a no-obligation discussion please call us on 08000 321000, email us at info@ihotdesk.com or request a call-back.
