24/7 Technical Support Services – How Your Small Firm Can Provide Them

If you provide technical support services as a small IT company or one man band, the thought of providing 24/7 support to your customers probably hasn’t occurred to you. After all, everyone needs to get some sleep at some point!

However, there are ways that you can make your technical support services work around the clock cost-effectively. If you have clients operating 24/7 who would be willing to pay well for the service, it may be worth investigating one of the following three ways to provide it:

1. Use a Simple Answering Service – Numerous companies provide phone and e-mail answering services—from small local firms to large national businesses. If you can find one willing to answer basic customer queries, you can divert calls and e-mails to them when you and your staff finish for the day. Yes, they may have to disturb you in the event of an emergency, but if you’re confident that your client systems are stable, you can outsource the first-line, out-of-hours work with minimal disturbance.
   
    

2. Using a Network Operations Center (NOC) Service – An increasing number of companies are now offering NOC services to small IT providers. These companies deal with first- and second-line support issues as well as routine tasks and can act as a first point of contact for your clients—sometimes at a rate affordable enough to allow you to profit from the service.

3. Outsource to Freelancers – Online job boards such as Elance and oDesk can put you in touch with armies of freelancers all over the world. Many of these freelancers are highly-trained IT professionals charging incredibly low hourly rates due to their location in the world.

By partnering with one or more of these freelancers, you can offer an out-of-hours service. Provide them with remote access, and they only need to disturb you for the most serious of issues—the kind of issues that would have caused you to get a call from the client anyway.

Do you offer 24/7 technical support services? Have you considered it? Share your views in the Comment box below. 

And to follow-through on the tips introduced in this short article, be sure to download your free copy of the special report on IT Service Contract Secrets for Getting More Repeat Clients and Recurring Service Revenue. 

Creative Commons Image Source: flickr groundswell