You’re finally ready to take the plunge. After years of living with ad hoc IT support, you’ve decided to hire a managed IT service provider to take care of your IT needs. You find a very attractive partner who promises you quick response times, low prices, and discounts on your Microsoft licenses and cloud backups. It feels like a match made in heaven, and you commit to a long-term relationship.
Everything starts off splendidly. You no longer have to worry about your day-to-day IT problems and overall you’re pretty happy with your new partner. But then the honeymoon phase ends. Issues they promised to fix aren’t ever actually resolved. Your phone calls go unanswered. Unexpected invoices start to appear in your inbox.
You decide that you’ve had enough and tell them that you want to end the relationship. They try to woo you to stay, but you’ve made up your mind and want to partner with a different provider. They comply with your request, but during your off-boarding discussion they mention the slight wrinkle about your Microsoft licenses being locked into their vendor’s portal until the end of the agreed-upon term. This will make it difficult for your next IT partner to fully manage your Office 365 subscriptions. They also inform you that your cloud backup subscription will be cancelled at the end of next month, so you will either need to expedite an expensive migration, or partner with another managed IT service provider who re-sells this service.
Or you could just settle for this mediocre service and keep things simple.
You find yourself saddled with baggage, in a worse situation than when you started. How could you have avoided this entanglement?
By asking a simple question before committing to your IT provider:
At EMKAL, we’ve taken great care to structure our business so that we can confidently respond:
On your last day with us, we will provide you with a complete set of credentials to manage your services, which you fully own and control. Your new IT partner will have a comprehensive package to allow for a smooth hand-over. Although we have a client churn rate of only 5% since 2014 and some of our customers have been with us for well over a decade, off-boarding is not an after-thought for us. Every recommendation we make takes into consideration that you may not be our client forever.
Could your current or future IT provider say the same?
We have experience helping small and medium-sized companies resolve messy breakups with their IT partner. If you need advice about how to cleanly separate from an IT provider that just isn’t meeting your expectations anymore, feel free to contact us!