How Much Does IT Support Cost?

How Much Should it be costing you?

Watch the full video on this topic here - IT Support Costs.

We provide IT and telecom services to businesses in Kent, Sussex and London. Today I'm answering the question, how much does IT support cost?

My immediate answer is ￡25 a month per user.

That's what we tend to charge as a starting point for small to medium size customers who are reasonably local to us. That would include everything, unlimited support, not including site visits. But you might find that you get quoted more or less than that, and it does depend on your business and also depends on the support company that are providing the support to you. I'm just going to go through why that might be more or less as it affects how much IT support costs a typical business or organisation,

The cost of support might vary depending on the number of users

Obviously, if you've got a small number of users, you're probably going to pay a higher price per user, more than ￡25 a month. If you've got a larger number of users, the price should go down because of economies of scale kick in. But there are some things that also would affect the price so I'm just going to go through and list some of these.

Does your IT support company use a proper ticketing system?

Your support company, hopefully, have a ticketing system, which is a system that manages all tickets and faults and issues raised. That would normally mean that an email will go into your help desk into the ticketing system, you'd be given a reference number, and then that will be allocated to an engineer to resolve. That ticketing system will help manage the tickets and also it will help measure the response time to the tickets and make sure that tickets aren't forgotten. Those sorts of ticketing systems do normally cost extra money for the supplier so that might inflate their costs to some extent.

The cost of monitoring all your network devices

They also might have monitoring software. For instance, we use Artera (our monitoring system), which we pay for, which is a monitoring software application which is put on all devices that we support. Anytime there's any problem with those devices, we get alerts. We may also put in some monitoring on your firewalls and routers so that if your internet connection ever goes down, we also get alerted to that. We will probably know that you've got a problem before you do, so that might also be an extra cost.

IT Support and the resource versus number of customers

You've also got to look at the number of customers that the support company has versus the number of help desk people. The way that we are able to provide wow factor support is by always having more help desk people available than we actually physically need. Now, of course, some businesses like us might elect to scrimp on this and they may decide to try and get their money's worth and they may not have enough business help desk people to deal with the numbers of customers so their response time will go up. But, of course, if they do have that situation, then their costs are lower because they're not employing the numbers of people that they need to employ to provide wow factor support.

What is included in the IT Support and what is being supported?

You've also got to look at the things that are being supported. If you've got some old slow equipment that has regular problems and you're running older operating systems, then that's going to be more expensive and there's going to be more tickets. You might find that you pay a higher charge.

How much does IT Support cost if you have moved away from on-premises servers to cloud technology?

If you've moved away from premises based servers, then the support charge should go down because by moving to cloud and Microsoft 365 and SharePoint and Azure and things like that makes it more low maintenance. You should find that your charges should be lower rather than having lots of 'TIN' [physical equipment and servers] in your server acts.

You've also got to look at what's included within the support. We provide remote unlimited support for everything. Some companies might charge extra for doing this and that on various bits of your IT set up. They also might charge extra for site visits, which I think is probably a good thing, because you don't want to really include site visits because that would inflate the price. Look at advanced unlimited support. Hopefully, they're providing this and not charging you extra for doing other bits.

Payment options for IT Support

Sometimes customers ask us, "Well, I just want to pay a monthly retainer." That's fine. You can do that. But, for smaller customers, we have an advanced crediting system so we will charge them for 10 hours of support in advance, which they pay for, and then they use up their 10 hours as they go along. And then, they replenish their advanced support credits when the time comes when they've used up all their credits. That's quite a good way of doing things, but only really manageable for maybe smaller businesses. Not so easy for us to manage that when there's lots of people to support for your business. Also look at whether they're including other things like routers, firewalls, wifi, and things like that. The more things that are included, really, the more the charge should be but it really does depend.

What about IT Support contracts?

Also, look at your contracts. We tend to just charge a 30 day monthly rolling contract. We have some customers saying, "Well, can I pay for an annual contract? Does that affect how Much IT Support costs a business?" Well maybe and that is fine too. I would recommend that no business ever has more than a 12 month contract because, in my experience, lots of IT providers really need to prove themselves and you don't find out how good they are until you start using them. Being committed for more than 12 months is certainly not a good idea. That's why the 30 day rolling contract, I think, is a good way of doing it. Obviously, they may try to get you to sign up to longer contracts, probably because they've got to pay sales people commission up front. We just don't have that problem because we don't pay sales people. We don't really have any sales people other than myself and our techies that, basically, aren't really sales people. We're just solution providers really and we don't have to pay commission.

That's it, really, in a nutshell. There's probably a lot more I could talk about if I thought about it. But if you want to know a decent benchmark price for IT support for your business, I would say ￡25 a month is a good starting point per user. Thank you very much. If you need any help or advice, please get in touch.

Our website address is tecwork.co.uk.

You can email us at [email protected], or you can phone 01892 578666.

Thank you very much and I do hope that's been helpful for you.