IT customer support is an area that is often not properly negotiated, and many dysfunctional contracts are the result of improperly understood positions of either party around support.
There are some basic areas that you should consider covering in the negotiation stage to ensure that you understand the costs, implications and what you can expect related to support. Most business customers equate how well a service is supported as a measure of how good IT services are.
Many IT services providers suffer complaints and accusations of poor quality when in fact they are delivering exactly the level of support paid for. This is no consolation, however, for either party, and does nothing to quell the perceptional issues. The best course of action is to negotiate this properly in the first place, and then ensure that users understand what is being paid for.
Some of the basics that should always be covered in customer support are the management of the following:
Incident Management Negotiation
When a customer experiences an unexpected disruption in service quality or availability, a clear mechanism for support should be understood. IT services providers should use system monitoring to detect events that can be fixed before an incident occurs. Determine whether your hired organization does this and what the even thresholds are. Beyond event detection, you should negotiate the agreed time elapse between the time an incident is reported and when work begins on it.
Management of Problems
In IT services management, a problem has a special meaning. It is the process used to find the cause of recurring incidents or issues that need to be identified and fixing them permanently. From a business perspective, there is a major interest in making sure your services provider does this because it saves money, time, disruption to business services, and allows proactive management of your service to occur. On a day-to-day basis, you won't normally be involved directly with problem management but you should be certain that your IT services company is.
Changes
Every service will undergo changes. Some of these are planned as part of business growth and some for technical maintenance and improvements. Every year, businesses lose millions of dollars when unplanned, or poorly managed, changes are introduced that create incidents. In fact, change-related failure is the number-one cause of service disruptions. It makes change management a critical negotiation point in the service agreement.
Service Complaints
Customer satisfaction is at the center of all productive business/IT relationships. It is not enough to measure customer satisfaction by periodic surveys alone. The IT services provider must provide a well-functioning mechanism for dealing with service complaints. What is also true is that if the business is playing its role responsibly in the service relationship, it will be involved in establishing a high level of awareness among its users about the service agreement, its terms, its conditions, and the role the users must play to also support good service quality.
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