Who is your desktop support provider?

Our organization has been fighting for years to differentiate ourselves from the rest of our competition.  Our competition has changed over the last 12 years because we have followed a model of continual improvement.  When we began the process, our target audience was the end-consumer.  Beginning with the recession of 2008 and the sharp increase in competition for residential business that same year, combined with the decrease in price of hardware, we realized we had to do a better job of differentiating ourselves from our competition as a local computer repair shop to a value added reseller with a managed services practice.  I won't bore you with the blow by blow of that process.  What I will do is outline the difference between a traditional computer repair shop and a managed support practice from an executive level outlook.

What TRA does to differentiate from the rest is easily summed up into the words proactive and value-added.

Proactive:

We look for ways to be proactive rather than reactive in our response to problems.  We do not strive to be a break-fix shop.  There is always a place for break-fix work, and we do fill that need when it comes up.  To our customers, downtime is toxic, efficiency is a must, and costs should be predictable.  We employ RMM agents to catch issues as they come up, perform updating, patching, alerting, schedule maintenance, and remote support.  Furthermore, we employ managed AV agents to provide an added layer of security.  By putting the right pieces in place, we are able to successfully charge a flatter rate to our customers, and there are very few surprises.

Value-Added:

To our customers, we strive to be not only the "computer guys", but rather a partner in their growth.  We seek to align our business to our customer's businesses to partner for long-term growth.  This means we are always looking for opportunities which allow us to serve our customers better while increasing their efficiency.  This means that in addition to providing traditional deskside and remote support, we are providing the peripheral services that make us even more valuable to our customers; whether that be hosted exchange, business-productivity software, subscription-based services, hardware leasing, or support of proprietary software.

TRA Consulting has developed considerable internal competencies as a result of our growth.  We are looking to the future and thinking big for our customer's benefit.

Who do you partner with?  Is your IT provider keeping you in a box, hindering your growth?  Can you consider your IT provider a partner in your success?

TRA Consulting, Inc.