What prevents outsourcers from working better than the regular admin

Being a steep admin is not enough to open your business and successfully provide services to other companies, replacing full-time, albeit less steep specialists. And it's not about marketing or sales, but the fact that working with an external company and working with a full-time specialist are two different formats of interaction that require different approaches to work. In the general case, there is less trust in an external company and much more demands - all this is called “consumer attitude”. To successfully work in the outsourcing business, you need not only to be transparent and convenient for the client, but also to be able to protect the business from "consumer extremism." Unfortunately, the lack of understanding how to combine the first with the second and third forced more than one company to give up on this business and services.

In this article I want to talk about errors that allow outsourcers, and which make their services less attractive to customers compared with the full-time administrator. I'll start with the most common:
')
1. Unpredictable maintenance cost



We all do not like extra expenses, but we simply hate unexpected expenses. Even if super specialists work in an external company, but at the same time the cost of service varies from month to month is unpredictable for the client, the client will hire a full-time admin working at a fixed salary as soon as possible - just like we all chose more in due time. slow, and even slightly more expensive, but unlimited Internet rates.

The cost of service may vary if these changes are due to new and understandable customer needs. The client decided to move to a new office, introduce a new system, he needed support outside working hours - these are understandable reasons for increasing the check. But the tasks of the form: move to a new server, cure a virus, create a new user - these are standard tasks for any company whose solutions the client expects for a fixed monthly cost. Naturally, the question arises: how can an outsourcer estimate the scope of these tasks in order to “not fly into the pipe”, and here we proceed to the following common error:

2. A variety of IT infrastructures at clients



The more nuances you need to keep in mind, the harder it is to work. The staff admin only works with the systems of his company. Outsourcing specialists should keep in mind information about IT infrastructures of several clients. If an outsourcing company takes on customer service with any systems and in any state, then its experts will, willy-nilly, make more mistakes and solve problems more slowly than regular administrators.

The only way to serve customers as well as full-time admins is to serve customers with similar IT infrastructures. Such a requirement, on the one hand, greatly reduces the number of customers, and on the other, it allows you to create certain “know-hows” that increase both the quality of customer systems and the quality of service. But the main thing is that the same infrastructures make it possible to more accurately calculate the costs of maintenance, and therefore they allow the client to offer an adequate cost of services. True, the uniformity of infrastructures does not always allow working with predictable profitability, if the outsourcer:

3. Incomprehensible to the client services



If the client does not understand what the outsourcer does in the framework of the contract, he will interpret the terms of the contract in his favor. Regular admin can simply "serve" the IT infrastructure. But in the case of an external company, the wording “support”, “maintenance”, “maintenance” does not give the client any information about the work performed. By signing a similar agreement, the client puts his expectation and vision into these words. And when the client’s requirements go beyond the expectations of the outsourcer, the latter faces a choice - either to do what the client asks (thereby tacitly incorporating the client’s desires into the service), or to enter into a dispute with the client regarding the understanding of the word “service”.

The other extreme is a detailed technical description of services. It was here that the guys did a serious job, making the description so saturated with technical terms that it is difficult to master even technical specialists, not to mention clients. As a result, it is difficult for the client to understand whether he will receive what he needs and does he not overpay for what he really does not need (does our company really need all 100 pages?).

The contract with the outsourcer is signed by the head of the company who does not understand the technical aspects of the work. So that an outsourcing contract does not look like a Chinese letter, it is desirable to formulate descriptions of tasks performed by an outsourcer in the form of customer-understandable needs and tangible limitations - I described my vision in the comments to the article at the link above. But even if the client clearly understands what the outsource provider does (and does not do), this does not give the client confidence if the outsource provider works on the principle:

4. Work from problem to problem



Malfunctions are unpleasant for both the company and the administrator. Staff admin is always at hand and is ready to immediately begin to eliminate the most important problems in the work. But an outsourcer serves several companies and each of them has the “most important problem” at the same time as the others, and it’s only a matter of time before the outsourcer’s experts are late for another feat. For this reason, its “dedicated” even if the only full-time system administrator in the eyes of the client is more reliable than the “shared” outsourcing specialists.

The only way for an outsourcer to be more reliable than a full-time system administrator is to prevent failures that may adversely affect the client’s business. This requires both building an appropriate IT infrastructure for the client, as well as constant monitoring and preventive maintenance of the systems. The task of an outsourcer is to move from an ad hoc format of work typical of full-time system administrators to timely planning, risk analysis and systematic work on monitoring and updating systems. But even the complete absence of failures in the client’s infrastructure is not a guarantee of long-term relations if the outsourcer allows himself:

5. Violation of the client’s corporate culture



As part of the organization, employees know where, how and to whom to contact on various issues. Regular admin solves the questions of others and solves the questions he needs in accordance with the procedures adopted in the company. But everything changes with the arrival of the outsourcer - instead of one full-time admin there appears a whole team of specialists who always strive to send bills directly to the accounting department, then to the general, bypassing the secretary, to go, then to leave for dinner, while the entire office is still waiting this hour and so on In general, in every way violate the internal culture and subordination, thereby delivering discomfort to the client’s employees.

Constantly ignoring the rules and values ​​of the client - an easy way to stop working with him. This does not mean that employees of an outsourcer need to perform a triple ku, if the client is so accepted - most likely, such clients should not work in principle. But knowing the necessary contact persons within the company, who need to be contacted on certain issues, and following the client’s internal procedures, it’s necessary not to force the client to send the outsourcer’s experts in the right direction each time. Otherwise, it is only a matter of time when the outsourcing experts will be sent ... well, you understand.

As an afterword:

Tell me who your client is and I will tell you what an outsourcer you are.

Customers buying IT outsourcing services can be divided into two categories: those who cannot afford a full-time admin and those who need more than full-time specialists can give. The first important thing is to just be someone who can solve their problems. The second is that there are no problems. For the service of the first it is enough to organize the logistics of engineers. For the latter, create refined processes and practices for servicing the systems used by the client. The first will not be invested in hardware or software unless absolutely necessary. The latter will not waste time on something that will only add them a headache. It is impossible to serve these two categories of clients with the same specialists, and for this reason the choice of the first clients largely determines what kind of outsourcing company will be in the future.

Well, and finally, a beautiful picture to demonstrate how to do the service (I dreamed of inserting it into my articles for two years):



Successes!

Ivan Kormachev
Company "IT Department"
www.depit.ru