Should you? Could you? Isn’t it better just to stick where you are? And doesn’t change always bring with it too much risk? Honestly, is it worth the pain to switch IT providers?

Is it worth the pain to switch IT providers? Believe it or not, this is a question our sales team hears a lot.

There seems to a preconceived idea or generally received wisdom that it is painful to switch IT providers.

Let’s assume that holds true and that it is painful to switch IT providers for the moment – but we’ll return to that debate later. For now, let’s consider the variety of situations you might currently find yourself in from which it would be worth some amount of pain to extract yourself.

#1. Your staff aren’t getting the support they need

How long does it take for your IT support company to recognise a ticket? How long does it take for a ticket to be satisfactorily resolved? And are your staff happy with how their requests are dealt with?

If your IT support company isn’t resolving tickets quickly, it’s going to be having a detrimental effect on your team’s productivity.

How many hours are lost while they wait for a system to be updated? Or a laptop to be repaired? What are all those workarounds really costing you in terms of efficiency and frustration? And is that same frustration affecting your staff attrition rates?

#2. Your organisation is exposed to unnecessary business risk

How effective is your cyber security?

Are you confident that your IT support company is fully protecting your people, your data, your systems and your organisational reputation? We all know the potential fines associated with GDPR if you suffer a data leak and can’t demonstrate effective cyber security, but the risks of poor cyber security go far further than this.

A cyber-attack can bring your business to a halt, it can negatively impact your customers and it can compromise important IP or other sensitive data. Those are scary but realistic scenarios, so if your IT support company isn’t being effective on cyber security then that’s a very good reason to put up with a bit of pain to switch to a company that is.

#3. Your team is getting support – but not enablement

Enablement sounds like one of those meaningless business-jargon words that pepper tech blogs but, in practice, it would be worth going through some pain if it moves your IT support company from delivering support to actually enabling your business goals.

• Proactive IT gives you the tools you need to solve business challenges and improve efficiency.

• Your team can’t innovate if their IT is holding them back.

• Given the business change that is going to be required for the nation to reach its net zero target, innovation is going to be a key requirement over the coming decade – and technology is going to be one powerful enabler for that.

• If your IT support company isn’t helping you to explore new technologies and how they might impact your business, you could be falling behind the competition and missing out on business opportunities.

#4. You have no visibility of whether your IT budget is being well spent

How is the information you get back from your IT company helping your organisation to plan its IT activity, business risk and investments? How are you measuring the return on your investment? What reporting is available to you to keep you informed about how they are performing against service levels?

If you don’t have the reporting and visibility to feel fully confident about whether your IT budget is being well spent, then surely that’s worth a bit of pain to find an IT partner that can give you this clarity and peace of mind?

Worth the pain?

Each of these four situations would be worth some amount of pain to escape.

However, what if we told you that switching IT companies needn’t be painful?

Yes, change does bring with it risk. But the great thing about risk is it can be managed. With detailed planning and a comprehensive, step-by-step approach it is possible to achieve significant change without any of those risks becoming issues.

In our experience, it is possible to change IT providers in as little as a month. Of course, this will depend on a couple of factors specific to your organisation. For example, the length of time left to run on your existing IT contract, if you have one. But however long it takes, the process needn’t be painful.

We use a seven-step transition process to which we constantly feed in the experiences of our new clients to ensure that this continually improving process is as systematic and streamlined as possible.

• It starts with an IT appraisal where we run through an early checklist of actions.

• Then we’ll work with you to agree to onboarding plan and schedule.

• We’ll onboard all your devices.

• We’ll action the most important upgrade and fixes as early as possible.

• Then we’ll move to ongoing support, ensuring that all your team know how to contact us and are happy with the process.

• Alongside this, we’ll agree a rolling schedule of work. This is agreed and updated together on a quarterly basis.

• Finally, we become your IT support partner – helping you take a proactive approach to your IT, so we become more than a support company; we’re a partner that enables your organisation to achieve its goals faster.

It’s a tried and trusted, remarkably hassle-free process that has been honed over many years. And, given how painless it is, it puts a very different slant on the question: is it worth the pain to switch IT providers?

Is it worth the pain to switch IT providers?

There’s an old maxim in IT: never change a working system. And while that might have held true to a certain extent for some time and in certain environments, it cannot be said to be true today.

IT isn’t just a business tool today: it is absolutely fundamental to many – if not all – the processes in your organisation. If you’re IT isn’t up to scratch, it is holding you back.

In today’s world of digitalisation and fast-paced technological change, it is absolutely worth the pain to switch IT providers if you are unhappy with the service you are receiving from your existing IT support company.

In such cases, it isn’t change that presents the risk; the bigger risk comes from inertia.

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