We've seen some IT firms say they will make your business more efficient and effective than you ever thought possible or that if you use them you need never worry about downtime or system failures or that you will never lose a dime to network downtime. If we made those claims would you believe us? It doesn't take much network downtime to cost you much more than a dime and anyone who promises you that you will have no network failures while they provide your IT support just isn't credible. We have too much respect for you to think you could be fooled by that and we don't think such claims are appropriate for business focused IT support.
We will promise that we are very aware that downtime is costly to you and that we will make every effort to minimize it- not just in recovering from failures but managing your network to minimize their occurrence. We'd rather impress you with our performance than with hype. For example, last year the domain registrar used by one of our customers "upgraded" their system. In the middle of the upgrade our customer's domain record was erased and set to the registrar's default settings. And much worse than that the record was corrupted and could not be edited so that neither we nor the domain registrar could get in to the record to put the correct settings back. This caused our customer's email to be down. The domain registration was not our responsibility but we realized that our customer could not afford to be without their email and the domain registrar couldn't even give an estimate when the problem would be fixed. Other IT support providers with whom we are familiar would not have pursued a solution beyond determining that the problem was in the domain registrar's systems. At that point the customer would have been told that they would have to wait until the domain registrar fixed the problem.
That's just the difference in how we think about our customers. When a function as critical as email is down we don't simply say it is not our problem and head for the door. Though normally there would be nothing we could do in such a case we didn't give up looking for a way around the problem. It is because we are cognizant of the impact that such failures have on our customer's business that we will keep looking for a way to get as much functionality back as possible even if the cause of the problem is in another vendor's systems. Because of a service that we had been providing to our "managed support" customers (and this customer was fortunately one of those) we were able to work around the domain registrar and get email back up and running. We had partial email service up within an hour. Within a few hours we had restored normal email function as though there was no problem with the domain record. But the domain record still had not been fixed. In fact it ended up taking three days for the domain registrar to fix the problem- an eternity for a business to be without email in 2012. But due to our tenacity and prior planning and having the right service in place ahead of time we were able to implement our "workaround" and save our customer from three days without email.
We couldn't prevent our customer from facing some downtime- and no other IT support firm would have been able to do so in that situation regardless of their claims. But in that situation where the cause of the failure and its solution were out of our control we believe we showed that we mean it when we say that we make every effort to minimize our customer's downtime.
We will promise that we are very aware that downtime is costly to you and that we will make every effort to minimize it- not just in recovering from failures but managing your network to minimize their occurrence. We'd rather impress you with our performance than with hype. For example, last year the domain registrar used by one of our customers "upgraded" their system. In the middle of the upgrade our customer's domain record was erased and set to the registrar's default settings. And much worse than that the record was corrupted and could not be edited so that neither we nor the domain registrar could get in to the record to put the correct settings back. This caused our customer's email to be down. The domain registration was not our responsibility but we realized that our customer could not afford to be without their email and the domain registrar couldn't even give an estimate when the problem would be fixed. Other IT support providers with whom we are familiar would not have pursued a solution beyond determining that the problem was in the domain registrar's systems. At that point the customer would have been told that they would have to wait until the domain registrar fixed the problem.
That's just the difference in how we think about our customers. When a function as critical as email is down we don't simply say it is not our problem and head for the door. Though normally there would be nothing we could do in such a case we didn't give up looking for a way around the problem. It is because we are cognizant of the impact that such failures have on our customer's business that we will keep looking for a way to get as much functionality back as possible even if the cause of the problem is in another vendor's systems. Because of a service that we had been providing to our "managed support" customers (and this customer was fortunately one of those) we were able to work around the domain registrar and get email back up and running. We had partial email service up within an hour. Within a few hours we had restored normal email function as though there was no problem with the domain record. But the domain record still had not been fixed. In fact it ended up taking three days for the domain registrar to fix the problem- an eternity for a business to be without email in 2012. But due to our tenacity and prior planning and having the right service in place ahead of time we were able to implement our "workaround" and save our customer from three days without email.
We couldn't prevent our customer from facing some downtime- and no other IT support firm would have been able to do so in that situation regardless of their claims. But in that situation where the cause of the failure and its solution were out of our control we believe we showed that we mean it when we say that we make every effort to minimize our customer's downtime.