A good IT support business doesn’t just help your company with installing and maintaining tech – although that’s clearly part of its role. The best IT service support providers will work with you proactively, helping your business to achieve operational efficiency and a true competitive advantage. However, that needs to be a cooperative, two-way process, and any business that chooses to use external IT service support owes it to itself to make that level of collaboration possible. So what can YOU do to help your IT support team, that will in turn help them to improve your business?

IT Service Support Can Involve Simple and Avoidable Issues

You might be surprised how much IT service support work involves dealing with rudimentary, and arguably avoidable, issues such as password resets … often while the user is sitting looking at a screen containing a prominent “Reset password?” link. A straightforward self-service password management system is useful, but perhaps more important is staff training – not every employee needs in-depth IT training, but basic induction courses to get staff familiar with the technology they’ll be using – and accessible refresher training when required – can go a long way to making employees more competent and, perhaps more importantly, more confident, in dealing with technology in their day-to-day role.

Another element of effective external IT service support is remote troubleshooting access to your company’s devices – but that can become problematic when operating systems are not kept up to date. This can be a particular issue with roaming employees who may only connect their laptops to the company network on an irregular ad-hoc basis. The answer here is to be proactive with operating system and software updates, and where possible to employ tools that allow your external IT support business to remotely roll out crucial updates and patches.

All too often companies believe that when they outsource their IT service support, they don’t need to put too much thought into having a proactive and robust IT strategy – but in reality that couldn’t be farther from the truth. There can be real benefits – to both your IT support provider and your own business’s operational efficiency – in developing and adopting a technology skill set matrix for every department or team in your company. This is a straightforward way of identifying the tech skills required in any given role, and any skills gaps that can be resolved with the necessary training.