4 Crucial Questions You Need to Ask Before Working with a Managed IT Service

Outsourcing your IT can be a great decision if you don’t feel the need to hire a team in-house. You may still have some sensitive information that needs to be protected and need to restrict data while allowing a certain level of access to your team. A managed IT service can help you do that, all for a fraction of the price of having an IT professional on your payroll.

Safety is only dependent on the quality of the service, however. Choose the wrong one, and you could end up risking your business, or have your operations disrupted by their incompetence. Let’s take a look at a few questions you need to ask before working with a managed IT service.

What’s Your Expertise?

The first thing you have to do is check if they have experience working with your type of industry and whether they can fulfill your needs. For instance, you might have a hybrid team with some people working at the office and some working from home, or your employees may be using their own devices to access your database. You need to make sure that they have experience dealing with this and can implement the solutions you need.

How Do You Handle Service Calls?

This is a straightforward question, and it should have a simple answer. While it’s true that visits will be different depending on the case, there should be some sort of protocol that will guide their time with you. You should be able to tell by their response how fast it takes for them to get on site and what you can expect from them once they get there.

What is Their Communication Like?

Not all service providers will be as hands-on, and if you feel like you’re going to need a lot of support, you need to get a sense of their communication style. However, not everyone wants their IT service to always be peaking over their shoulders. This is, again, where you need to assess your needs and make sure that they match with the provider’s work style.

Whatever the case may be, reputable managed IT services will give you a way to reach them at all times and get a fast response. This is why you need to make sure that the service you work with explains their help-desk process and that they have a reasonable response time.

Can I Contact Some References?

Another thing you should do is make sure that you get some references of people they have worked with. Make sure they’re as recent as possible. This will allow you to get a sense of what the relationship was like. You will be able to ask questions to gauge the MSP’s level of engagement and ask them exactly how they were able to help. You can also use the reference to verify any of the responses the provider gave earlier.

If you ask these few questions to prospective managed IT service providers, you will be able to get a better sense of whether they can be trusted. You’ll also be able to tell if the two of you will be on the same page.