Typical IT Support Costs

Typical IT Support Costs

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ArsE92

Original Poster:

21,007 posts

186 months

Tuesday 22nd July 2014
quotequote all
Hi All

I'm trying to gather some data on what a small business would typically pay for IT support. I'd also be interested to hear what kind of support model most of you use.

There seems to be two types of support generally available:

1 - Pay as you go. I've seen some costs between £75 - £150 per 'incident'.
2 - Contractual, paid monthly.

I know it will vary depending on the complexity of your systems, number of 'seats', SLA etc, but I'm just trying to get some ball-park figures please?

I'd also be interested to hear how happy you are with the service you recieve? What do they do that is great? What could they improve on? (I'm not fishing for business).

Thanks in advance smile


LukeFR

65 posts

134 months

Tuesday 22nd July 2014
quotequote all
What kind of volume of people do you have working for you and whst is the likely calls going to bE?

I know of a company who charge £35 per call, just starting out and looking to get new contracts.

miniman

24,824 posts

261 months

Tuesday 22nd July 2014
quotequote all
Friend of mine does £9.99 per month per PC.

P-Jay

10,551 posts

190 months

Wednesday 23rd July 2014
quotequote all
We charge £25 per PC and £50 per server per month (plus VAT)

Unlimited remote support, unlimited site visits, server monitoring and nightly data back-up.

the 'per PC' thing is just for the sake of quoting, we support printers, network switches etc. Plus will liaise with 3rd party suppliers like Broadband providers, software providers etc on clients behalf and do everything from a bit of training on say Windows 8 for staff up to disaster recovery.

SLA for first response is 4 working hours, but we're down to sub-hour 99% of the time.

Prices / Service seems to vary wildly - we've got a local competitor who charges about the same as us monthly, but only covers remote stuff - site visits, monitoring, back-up all chargeable and if I was a cynic if I was working for them and given the choice of fixing something in 10 mins remotely for no extra charge, or getting in the car and charging £150 to do it I might be tempted to over-egg a problem on occasion.

DSLiverpool

14,670 posts

201 months

Wednesday 23rd July 2014
quotequote all
ArsE92 said:
Hi All

I'm trying to gather some data on what a small business would typically pay for IT support. I'd also be interested to hear what kind of support model most of you use.

There seems to be two types of support generally available:

1 - Pay as you go. I've seen some costs between £75 - £150 per 'incident'.
2 - Contractual, paid monthly.

I know it will vary depending on the complexity of your systems, number of 'seats', SLA etc, but I'm just trying to get some ball-park figures please?

I'd also be interested to hear how happy you are with the service you recieve? What do they do that is great? What could they improve on? (I'm not fishing for business).

Thanks in advance smile
For 12 PC`s and our data network and anything computerish we pay £150 a month to the huge fulfilment company 100 yards away - we asked them if we could use their resource and we started on a trial basis 5 years ago - they are on site in minutes if we have an issue and know far more than we ever need. We had a quote from a dedicated company for more than double that

AndyNetwork

1,831 posts

193 months

Friday 25th July 2014
quotequote all
Depends on the level of cover you want.

I do a little of this as a side line to my day to day IT job, and because the companies involved know this, they are prepared to accept that it may be a day before I get on site.

As a result they pay less than if they were paying a company to provide 4 hour response times. The price I charge them depends on who they are, one company is owned by a mate of mine, and pays in beer and kebabs, another is quite a distance away, and pays £22 per hour, one closer to home only pays £18 per hour.

One company I help has a contract with a provider for day to day immediate support, but come to me for any improvements, new PC's changes to their infrastructure etc.

Bikerjon

2,202 posts

160 months

Friday 25th July 2014
quotequote all
I work in this area too so I'm also interested in this thread! In my experience small businesses will do anything to avoid paying a monthly contract - they just don't see it as value for money. They will muddle through by any means possible and will only call when they've exhausted all the free avenues of support! As more things go cloud-based there's little need to run on-premise servers which I think used to be the main driver to have professional support. For these reasons most of my work tends to be chargeable per incident.

buggalugs

9,243 posts

236 months

Sunday 27th July 2014
quotequote all
A lot depends on the neediness/requirements/expectations of the end user but 20/user/month is a fair average for me. There are always exceptions and outliers for various reasons.

mph1977

12,467 posts

167 months

Sunday 27th July 2014
quotequote all
DSLiverpool said:
ArsE92 said:
Hi All

I'm trying to gather some data on what a small business would typically pay for IT support. I'd also be interested to hear what kind of support model most of you use.

There seems to be two types of support generally available:

1 - Pay as you go. I've seen some costs between £75 - £150 per 'incident'.
2 - Contractual, paid monthly.

I know it will vary depending on the complexity of your systems, number of 'seats', SLA etc, but I'm just trying to get some ball-park figures please?

I'd also be interested to hear how happy you are with the service you recieve? What do they do that is great? What could they improve on? (I'm not fishing for business).

Thanks in advance smile
For 12 PC`s and our data network and anything computerish we pay £150 a month to the huge fulfilment company 100 yards away - we asked them if we could use their resource and we started on a trial basis 5 years ago - they are on site in minutes if we have an issue and know far more than we ever need. We had a quote from a dedicated company for more than double that
Which is useful if you have a local complementary business of sufficient size to have their own IT bods, how word of caution here some of the in house IT set ups i've seen a dire - but some of that is down to muppet managers at the top of their service or at the bord or one step from the board level ... ( yes not having full redudancy on site as well as off site back ups does save £xk a month but when loss of service on site costs a few thousand GBP an hour in lost production...

and in house or seperate be careful of 1000% mark up on parts ... ( back case for a RF gun quoted as '1500 gbp' to the dept cost centre by in-house IT , google it and it's 150 USD + shipping...

ringram

14,700 posts

247 months

Sunday 27th July 2014
quotequote all
With stuff like InTune, cloud services and BYOD on the horizon support services are going to get crushed under competition.
Its a scale and margin game subject to low barriers to entry and heavy cost pressures.

Id be looking at companies that do this the smart way. Remote for 95% and only onsite for setup of new printers etc.

New users, laptops and desktops etc should be able to be easily set up remotely these days if the right stuff is in place.
That means more costly "on site" models are bad.

Self service, automation etc are where you should be looking to keep costs down.
and of course moving this way with your internal IT in general.

Aside from all that gumpf customer service is key.

bitchstewie

50,767 posts

209 months

Sunday 27th July 2014
quotequote all
Curious here, those of you that charge "per user or computer" do you include unlimited support?

I ask as I overhear the sort of stuff our in house support guys get called about and there's a line where it isn't support so much as "I don't know how to use the computer please tell me how".

buggalugs

9,243 posts

236 months

Monday 28th July 2014
quotequote all
ringram said:
With stuff like InTune, cloud services and BYOD on the horizon support services are going to get crushed under competition.
Its a scale and margin game subject to low barriers to entry and heavy cost pressures.

Id be looking at companies that do this the smart way. Remote for 95% and only onsite for setup of new printers etc.

New users, laptops and desktops etc should be able to be easily set up remotely these days if the right stuff is in place.
That means more costly "on site" models are bad.

Self service, automation etc are where you should be looking to keep costs down.
and of course moving this way with your internal IT in general.

Aside from all that gumpf customer service is key.
I agree on the customer service bit. Using these tools to drive to lowest pricing is good, the customer gets good service at low price and I don't have to waste half my billable day in the car. Importance of having a good relationship with the users and the business management can't be underestimated; as the IT provider you're in a position of great trust and responsibility.

When you've got 20 people sat there twiddling their thumbs at your expense do you want to ring someone you know and trust or do you want to ring one of a room full of minimum wager's with a Teamviewer account, over the moon that you saved a pre-tax £50/month from your £35K /mo turnover.

If I haven't been somewhere for a while I often do them a cheap visit rather than a remote just to keep the relationship going.