“How do you define an emergency?”
This is one of the frequent questions our sales team gets asked when they go out to meetings. It makes sense that business owners are going to ask this question, especially since most of them have had enough experience with various forms of IT support professionals that they know only those pre-defined “emergencies” will receive the most immediate response.
In this blog post, SLA Response Times-and Why Network Depot Doesn’t Have Them, we discussed what the different typical response times are for various levels of problems tickets.
For most companies, once they define what priority level a ticket is, the client can expect that it will take that long before they hear back from someone. Many times too, the definitions that are given to clients are fairly vague, so that the company can protect itself from a legal standpoint. But, this can lead to many situations where the client calls in with an issue that is extremely urgent to them, but because the person answering the phone doesn’t think it falls into a higher priority level, it doesn’t get the response time the client feels it deserves. So it does make sense that those business owners who have had experiences like this would want to know how we define an “emergency”.
But we like to answer that question with one of our own- “How do you define an emergency?”
For many companies, especially in the IT support industry, it helps to have clear guidelines in place for dealing with issues. When you are able to assign a priority level to an issue, it not only lets your engineers immediately know the status of a problem, it also helps provide the customer with realistic expectations in regards to response time for the issue.
So, if having those clear guidelines produces all those great benefits, why doesn’t Network Depot have them? Well, we do. We just go about it a little differently.
You see, instead of telling you up front how important or non-urgent an issue is, we are going to work with you on those definitions. Together, we are going to make sure everyone agrees on what constitutes an emergency situation.
For example, if you are a company where the majority of your employees work remotely, a problem with your VPN is going to be an extremely important issue. For a different company where maybe only one person works remotely every so often, the issue still needs to be fixed, but it won’t have the same level of urgency. And, maybe at a third company that almost never works remotely, if the boss is on an out-of-town business trip, trouble with the VPN is an incredibly urgent problem.
Providing IT support in the Washington DC metro area means that we are going to have many different types of clients, some of whom are going to have schedules and busy seasons based around the federal government. So, there are also going to be certain times of the year where issues that may not have been as urgent three months ago, now require immediate attention. By taking the time to work with you and understand your company, we can make sure that we provide you the level of support you need based on what you define as an emergency.
Of course, there are going to be some issues that will always classify as emergencies no matter what IT support company you work with- and we tend to think of these as disasters. Fires, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, power outages- anything that brings your business to a screeching halt- those are disasters, and will always be emergencies.
The truth is though, in many of those disaster emergency cases, how your business is going to recover is going to depend a lot more on what you do before the disaster strikes. Once the power goes out or a flood destroys your building, we can be there to help you salvage and rebuild. But without proper preparation on your part, there might not be much left.
If you want to learn more about how to plan for those types of emergency cases (so that they may not have to be emergencies after all) sign up for a FREE LIVE seminar we are hosting!