EXECUTIVE SUMMARY – Costs should already be down a minimum of 17% and you should be experiencing the best service of your life. In these incredibly challenging times, every self-aware company in every industry is attempting to first protect their own revenue. Your IT service firm is no different. That’s not necessarily bad thing, as long as it’s done right and in your company’s best interests first. We’ve been highly effective at reducing our clients’ monthly IT Operating Expense by as much as 30-45%, and we feel it’s important to share our strategy with you. As a country, we’re in this fight together and if we are going to come out of the other side of this COVID-19 Coronavirus situation safely on the other side, we all need to do our part, and includes your existing IT firm. Here’s what they should be already doing for you now:
Improved Service. Your experience with your IT service firm should be better than ever – these times are the true acid test of how an organization can perform. Yes, they should be doing more with less right now – just like everyone else needs to do to first survive, then grow. If your IT firm isn’t currently providing the best service you’ve ever seen, then you should know that unfortunately, the firm may not be right for you any longer and if the situation gets any worse, they might actually be a significantly large risk to your survival. Truly stable, capable firms will have already doubled down on providing exceptional service in according with their Service Level Agreements (they do have SLA’s, correct?). In general, they should be responding to your initial work inquiry within 90 minutes, responding to you within 60 minutes of your most recent note and resolving 95% of your requests within the first 45 minutes.
Audit of External Expenses for All Services. Now more than ever, it’s critical that you understand every IT operating expense and see it listed in one place – even an Excel spreadsheet is an ok start if nothing else, but you absolutely need to see it at a glance. There are probably lots of little parasitic charges that made their way onto your company’s credit cards and bills in the last year or so, and in a lot of cases, these services aren’t being fully used, or maybe not used at all. Removing unused services or reducing service tiers on existing software will have an immediate impact on bottom line revenue. Your existing IT service firm should have already provided a list of all of these charges and suggested cost savings metrics. If they haven’t, and aren’t able to, it’s a red flag they probably don’t have a good understanding of your IT operating expense. As a general guideline, IT expense should be approximately 3.28% of your overall revenue(1).
Month to Month Term for Work Remote Solutions. It’s unfortunate, but many IT firms are using this as an opportunity to “lock in” their clients to longer term work remote solutions. More established companies will both already have an enterprise work-remote solution in place, and also have the strength to be able to offer these terms to you on a month-to-month basis on as little as a single license for a single user, or better yet, at no cost to you. If your IT firm didn’t already have a work remote solution ready at the start of this pandemic, it’s a red flag, but in general, this service should be able to be deployed within 20 minutes and should not be more expensive than $15/user/month.
Consolidate Services. Most major platforms have multiple capabilities built in; for example, most modern phone systems have a chat and video conference feature. Some services like Zoom are designed for video conference but also include a conference calling service. In fact, some services include the capability to expand into these more robust features on an as-needed basis. Best of breed is good but these services can often be added later, and a collection of lightly-used services with heavy operating price tags will unnecessarily burden your books. As a minimum starting point, check to make sure your core telecom infrastructure is built for low cost ($17-$19/line/month) service with the capability easily to add on additional features (ie. video conference, voicemail transcription, integration to CRM systems).
Software Usage Levels. License waste is a real thing and costs real dollars, and in these challenging times, this is one area that can cost you big dollars at a time when you may not realistically have the ability to look at what’s being used and what isn’t really being used. We highly recommend analyzing existing software licensing and make sure there is no dead weight for terminated employees, services that may be operating a “Pro” or “Premier” tier for functions that aren’t being used today, but might have been in the past. Almost every modern service has a “last logon” date or “last opened” metric you can check to see if services are actually being used. Unless there’s a very special use case, most SaaS (web-based) software platforms should have logons from end users within the last 3 business days at any point.
How Do I Get More Information?
Schedule some time to talk with us – preferably, at a time that works for you: https://calendly.com/michaelsilva.
We hope you and your family are staying safe during this uniquely challenging time and we look forward to talking with you!