Is Good IT Help Hard To Find?

So my story starts at a conference room table with a frazzled business owner. If it were a dark and stormy night that may make this tale more exciting but no, it was 3pm in the afternoon. On this sunny afternoon my client was waiting for a call from their current IT provider. She had called them at 8am to request some technical help for a transaction that her accounting team was itching to execute. In this case, the email came in to the accounting team asking to wire $400,000 dollars into an escrow account. This is something that occurs regularly in their line of work so no one wanted to stand in the way of closing business but on this request, they were wise enough to question it before acting.

Let me say this right here, right now, if it is worth questioning, it's worth a phone call. Always pick up the phone to verify if you even slightly suspect the action being requested in an email could be fraudulent. You could save yourself and your organization from a very bad day.

Back to the conference room as we wait for the phone to ring. The owner described her level of frustration of being in limbo in this situation. As we chatted, she described the last time she called in a ticket that was business critical. She painfully recalled going three days without email on her work laptop. The voicemails. The waiting. Three days of phone tag, while trying to manage her business from her iPhone. She took it all in stride as though to say "That's how it has always been so that is how it is everywhere right?"

I run into this mindset a lot. It's not how it should be. Most IT professionals want to do better but it takes commitment and organization. These three points about RPM Technologies, LLC always come to my mind:

1. Our team picks up the phone 90% or more of the time with the goal of resolving your issue on that first call.
2. If a business critical ticket is called in to RPM it will trigger automated escalation as it ages. If it goes unhandled long enough it will have made it to our CEO!
3. Each person answering the phone is a local (US Midwest) IT professional who will escalate to our engineering team if the issue is beyond their capability.

I think "You actually do that?" came out of her mouth in disbelief after I walked her through our approach. Customer Service is a core tenant of what we do so we chose not to use a call back model of support. We also choose to escalate before people get frustrated from feeling like their issue isn't important to us. Just because IT service has been slow, or because IT may not seem to prioritize or follow up on issues appropriately does NOT mean that's how it is everywhere.

I always think back to the Nick Burns Saturday Night Live skits of the 2000's (MOVE!) when I hear some of the stories and comments from local businesses. No one in real life should have to put up with customer service like that. Good IT help may be hard to find but I can certainly point you in the right direction...www.rpmit.com.