Small businesses trying to look after their own technology (or indeed not looking after it and hoping for the best) can come badly unstuck when it comes to counting the cost of a poorly running or non-functioning system.
The worst thing is when the equipment runs out of its initial warranty contract and you've done nothing about renewing or finding an alternative; when things go wrong, you'll be at the back of the queue every time. The cost of repair, paid up incident by incident, is bound to total more than the fee for a steady contract.
Contracts can vary, though, and there are important points to watch out for when agreeing to sign one.
Check what's covered
This might sound an obvious point, but it is one to which smaller traders don't always adhere. Norman Cleary, director of sales and marketing for IT service company ServiceTec, explains: "It is not unusual for us to receive over 50 calls a month from a customer about equipment that is not on the original kit list, in other words not covered by the contract. We will of course resolve the problem and add the equipment to the inventory, but this equipment would have been supported more cost-effectively if it was part of the contract." An inventory can also save time. With an accurate kit list, engineers can maintain stocks of the right spares. The difficulty for many smaller businesses is that their technology has grown up almost of its own accord. Yes there's the stuff they planned to buy, but then there was that cheap printer when the old one went belly-up and they needed to nip down the road and get another one quickly, and so on.
Check what you can actually ask
Typically, small business owners/managers work vastly longer hours than normal human beings and they are slow to recognise that others don't always do likewise. Hence cases such as the one seen by Manny Pinon, sales and marketing director at communications equipment distributor Norwood Adam, when an entrepreneur working until 9.30 one evening found the screen going blank and within minutes was cursing his support company down the telephone for not wanting to come out and fix it immediately. "They really need to be realistic about their expectations," he says. Stress will cloud that judgment of course, but it's as well to bear in mind your support company is bound to honour the contract, not surpass it every time.
Watch service level agreements
Service level agreements (SLAs) can sound appealing until you consider the implications. Any maintenance organisation that claims it will keep your equipment working 100% of the time is either lying or redundant (since the thing's not going to go wrong). But consider how much margin you can afford; if they say they'll ensure your systems will work for 95% of the time that can sound good, but in the telecoms sector, for example, that would mean one call in 20 not getting through. Consider the time a repair is likely to take, and check to see whether you can claim compensation if a system isn't fixed within a given time.
Response times
Ask how a service company deals with incoming calls. Robert Gupta is general manager of Secon Solutions, a dealer in IT security products. "Instead of giving a ticket number and calling back later in the day - or worse, the following day - we provide a service where the next available support representative will take on the issue and start helping straight away if at all possible," he says. Well, he wouldn't have raised the subject otherwise, but it's a valid point: if you're going to get through to a faceless call centre or message service, consider looking elsewhere.
Accreditations
Many of the organisations that offer servicing are dealers in IT systems, and it's worth checking which accreditations they have. Most of the big computer manufacturers are fiercely proud of their dealer channels; Compaq, for example, will only address the small business and most of its corporate customers indirectly. This is partly a numbers issue but also one of geography: "If there's a need for a service visit we just can't be there as quickly as a local organisation," says Michael Johnston, Compaq's business development team director. Accredited dealers can be a good idea but check also that they will cover all of your equipment. If you have, say, a mix of PCs and Apple Macs then you might find your maintenance operative covers only one or the other. This can become a problem when there is an issue coming from the networking between the two: it must be clear in the contract who is responsible for maintaining which shared parts.
Doing your own upgrades
Probably one of the main reasons you are considering an external service company is so that you are not troubled with opening up the box yourself. If you are likely to want to put in extra memory or hard disks (these operations are very simple) then your contract needs to stipulate that the revamped computers are still covered, as are the new components added. Some maintenance companies won't want to be responsible for items which have been beyond their or the original manufacturer's control.
