How to Tell Whether Your IT Support Is Actually Proactive

Every IT support company describes itself as proactive. It’s on every website in the industry, including ours. As a claim it’s close to meaningless, because nobody advertises the alternative.

What’s more useful is knowing what proactive support actually produces, so you can judge whether you’re getting it. The difference shows up in specific, observable things rather than in how a provider describes themselves.

Here are ten questions worth asking about your current arrangement. They apply whether your IT is handled externally or by someone internal.

1. When did you last hear from them without raising a ticket?

This is the simplest test, and often the most revealing.

Proactive support generates contact you didn’t initiate. A note that a server is running low on disk space. A heads-up that a machine is due for replacement. A summary of what was done last month.

If every conversation you’ve had in the past year started with you reporting a problem, the relationship is reactive regardless of what the contract says.

Good looks like: regular contact you didn’t ask for, including when nothing is wrong.

2. Has anyone tested a restore from your backups?

Backups running successfully and backups being restorable are different things. The gap between them is only discovered at the worst possible moment, unless someone deliberately checks.

Good looks like: restores tested periodically, with the results reported to you. If you ask when the last test restore happened and nobody can answer, that’s your answer.

3. Do you know what hardware you have, and how old it is?

Someone should be able to tell you what devices exist, their age, their operating system, and roughly when each will need replacing.

Without that, hardware gets replaced when it fails, which means at random and usually inconveniently, rather than on a plan you can budget for.

Good looks like: an asset inventory you can see, and a replacement plan you’ve discussed.

4. Were you told about the last thing that broke before it broke?

Some failures are genuinely unpredictable. Many aren’t. Disks fill up gradually, hardware degrades with warning signs, certificates and licences expire on known dates.

Think about the last few problems you had. Were any of them foreseeable? Was anyone watching?

Good looks like: a proportion of issues resolved before you noticed them. Not all, but some.

5. Do you get reports, and do they say anything useful?

Many providers send monthly reports. Quite a lot of them are ticket counts and uptime percentages, which look like information without being much use.

A useful report tells you something you can act on: what’s changed, what’s coming, what’s worth spending money on and what isn’t.

Good looks like: reporting that occasionally leads to a decision. If you’ve never made a decision based on one, it isn’t doing its job.

6. When did you last have a conversation about next year?

Reactive support deals with today. Proactive support includes someone occasionally raising what’s coming, whether that’s software going end-of-life, capacity you’ll outgrow, or a licence model changing.

Good looks like: a periodic conversation about direction rather than only incidents. Quarterly is common. Annually is a minimum.

7. Do you know who has access to what?

Access tends to accumulate. People join, change roles, and leave, and permissions rarely get tidied up unless someone makes a point of it.

Good looks like: someone reviews access periodically, and leavers are removed from everything rather than just email.

8. Is anything you’re running unsupported?

Operating systems and applications reach end of support on published, predictable dates. Nothing about it is a surprise.

If you’re running something unsupported and nobody has raised it with you, that’s a clear signal about how far ahead anyone is looking.

Good looks like: being told about end-of-life dates well in advance, with a plan and a cost, rather than after the fact.

9. What happens when you raise something non-urgent?

Urgent problems get attention everywhere. The interesting question is what happens to the things that are merely annoying, the slow laptop, the printer that needs restarting weekly, the process that takes longer than it should.

Reactive support fixes urgent things and lets small ones accumulate. Those accumulated small things are often where most of the wasted time actually sits.

Good looks like: minor issues getting resolved rather than worked around indefinitely.

10. If your main contact left tomorrow, would anything be lost?

Ask whether your setup is documented, and whether you could see that documentation.

If everything lives in one person’s memory, whether that’s someone at your provider or someone internal, you have a single point of failure that has nothing to do with technology.

Good looks like: documentation that exists, is current, and is available to you rather than held exclusively by the provider.

Reading Your Answers

If most of these have good answers, your support is working. Be glad, and don’t change anything on the strength of a marketing claim from someone else.

If a few are weak, that’s normal. Most arrangements have gaps, and gaps are usually fixable by raising them. A reasonable provider will respond well to “could we start doing test restores?”

If nearly all of them are weak, you’re paying for reactive support and probably being told it’s proactive. That’s worth a direct conversation before it’s worth changing provider, because the honest truth is that some of these gaps come from a support contract that was never scoped to include them, rather than from anyone doing a bad job.

Which is its own useful thing to establish. If your contract doesn’t cover proactive work, no amount of goodwill will produce it.

A Fair Caveat

Proactive support costs more to deliver than reactive support, because someone has to spend time on things that aren’t currently broken. A cheap contract that only covers responding to problems isn’t necessarily poor value, provided you know that’s what you bought.

The problem is being sold proactive support and receiving reactive support. This list is really a way of establishing which you have.

Want a Second Opinion?

CCSW provides IT support to businesses across Cardiff and South Wales. If you’ve worked through these questions and you’re not happy with the answers, we’re glad to talk it through, including telling you if we think your current arrangement is fine. Get in touch or call 0333 014 4544.