Just like with for-profit businesses and sectors, more and more charitable organisations are looking to leverage technology to enhance their productivity, and maximise their impact. When businesses rely on technology for their work, this in turn means they need to have good IT support in place.
In 2022, it is generally agreed the easiest way to guarantee your organisation access to high quality IT support is by outsourcing it to an IT support company; for instance, small businesses that don’t have a big enough budget to hire and train their own IT department frequently outsourced.
IT Support for Charities
We spoke to a company that has been providing small business IT support London based charities have relied on for over a decade. The company – known as TechQuarters – told us all about what constitutes a good IT support service for charities in 2022. According to them, there are certain qualities that one should look out for, which are indicators of a high quality service. Below is a brief list of some of these important aspects…
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Reactive
Firstly, TechQuarters talked about how an IT support provider should ensure that they run a highly reactive service. This means responding to cases and client inquiries very quickly.
There are some IT support companies on the market who might make promises on fixing IT issues within a certain amount of time. This is usually indicates that the support provider might cut corners in an attempt to resolve cases within the time they promised, which could simply cause more problems down the line.
A company that places guarantees on response times, however, are promising that they will get to work on cases as quickly as possible, but they will only close the case when they are sure that the ideal solution has been found.
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Proactive
As well as committing to fast response times, a good IT support provider in 2022 should also be committed to working proactive to support their clients. The top companies that provide IT support services in London are doing away with the old the old break/fix model, and instead opting for proactive methodologies to look after their client’s IT infrastructures.
This means working to anticipate issues – monitoring networks and infrastructure; analysing past performance to see where an organisation might have a weak spot, and working to resolve said weak spot. In other words an IT support provider should be doing everything they can to minimize the number of actual IT issues their clients experience.
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Flexible
A good IT support provider should also be highly flexible in the types of services they offer. For example, TechQuarters offers a flagship IT Support plan which is designed to fulfil all the IT support needs of the majority of their customer base. However, they also provide a range of other plans – some of which omit certain features, or include different features.
The idea of having flexible services is based on the fact that not every business will have the same needs. Some companies may need on-premise support, for instance; whereas others might need remote-only support. Some organisations might want access to IT support outside of normal working hours, or even on the weekend.
Having a range of plans that meet the varying needs of an organisation is a valuable quality.
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Account Management
Offering transparency into the service one provides is a highly valued quality, because helps to instil trust in the client, and helps to build a positive – potentially long-term – relationship. A common way of doing this is by offering account management.
TechQuarters assigns an account manager to all of their clients. This means that every customer has a personal point of contact whenever they need to discuss the service they are getting, give feedback, ask for advice, etc.
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Knows Your Sector
One of the most important qualities of a good IT support service is that the provider knows your sector. TechQuarters told us that the IT support for charities that they offer has been most successful because they have taken considerable effort to learn all about the non-profit sector which, in many ways, can be more complex than the average for-profit business model.
Every sector will have different technologies and practices that are unique to them. For instance, charities rely heavily on solutions like Customer Relationship Management, Impact Reporting, Online Fundraising, etc. IT support provider that knows the ins and outs of these types of technology will be able to provide a better service than those who do not.
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