Every month we publish a letter from an anonymous ETO, sharing their thoughts on an issue that has been bothering them. We then get in touch with key businesses in the industry to see what they have to say back. This month, our ETO X talked the pros and cons of using outsourced IT support.
Read June Edition of ETO X here
We can’t know everything… but we try!
Obviously, if a customer has a problem you try and fix it for them, but if they’ve bought products from elsewhere and you don’t have any information about those products then you can’t really help them. ETOs can sometimes expect us to fix things which we have no idea about – this is difficult, especially if you are a company that also provides certain IT solutions. The support team will naturally know much more about our recommended products than those which we don’t tend to advise buying.
Nevertheless, this isn’t to say we don’t welcome the challenge; our ultimate goal is always to help ETOs, and so we’ll give it our best go. We would never intend to drag out the preparation process, but we need to understand as much as we can about the product and the error that has occurred to try and fix it, and this can take some time.
The Whatsapp conundrum
Offering a 24/7 Whatsapp service could result in having to raise support prices, which companies might worry would lose them customers. This is one reason why I can imagine a lot of businesses have not adopted this idea, despite the great feedback it has got here. We would have to train our engineers in how to best respond over instant message, and some may not be comfortable with doing this.
Some companies might feel they want to keep a more old-school professionalism to their communications, sticking with traditional mediums like phone and e-mail. The use of Whatsapp would likely mean mixing private and business communication, which employees might value having separate. There is also a worry about how to ensure confidential data is best protected while using a not business-dedicated messaging app such as Whatsapp, though I am sure there are ways to do it. It’s certainly interesting to see it mentioned as such a valuable feature.
