How do You Define Downtime? 

IT Service Level Agreements – beloved of many internal IT teams and IT businesses - generally talk in terms of IT outages – they measure the minutes/hours that a device, network, or cloud service is not available. They then have lots of words that seek to define the nature of any reported issue – its business criticality – in order to assess whether they are obliged to accept the ticket and give themselves plenty of time to respond. Success in meeting that objective is generally ensured by asking the user/customer to provide more information.

Does this narrow, technical approach miss the point entirely?

Surely downtime should be measured in terms of people productivity – the aggregate of all the man hours lost across your business as a result of any IT related issue – whether that be hardware, network, cloud service related or associated with internal IT resource availability or end user skills. Whatever the cause - the impact on your business is the same.

Productive hours are being lost. Surely that’s the number that we should all be focused on reducing? 

The staff downtime problem is compounded when staff have low expectations in terms of speed/quality of support and/or don’t have access to resources to help themselves. Then staff downtime becomes more than a “in that moment” productivity issue – it becomes corrosive to morale – which bears down on productivity generally. 

Staff downtime is a function of two variables:

• The number of people and quality of skill that you have on staff within you own IT team. 
• The number of people and quality of skill that your IT Partner makes available. 
• The leadership of the IT Partner that you work with. If the leadership of your Partner is committed to delivering great support – this will be anchored in the culture of the business, they will invest the right amount of resource/money and will measure the outcome – customer satisfaction – in the form of a Net Promoter Score (NPS). These businesses will enjoy high levels of referral and recommendation.

• Your staff turnover and training budget. 
• What training costs. If the leadership of your Partner is committed to delivering great support – they’ll see training as an inclusive part of the service, they offer. They will instinctively understand that the easiest support call to answer is the one that is never made. 

If the leadership of your Partner is focussed on the next deal they are going to close – this too will be anchored in the culture of the business. They will assign the bare minimum amount of time and resource to their support and training obligations. These businesses will experience high levels of “churn” - where customers move away from them – but spend relatively little time worrying about it.

Where is the leadership of your current Partner focused?

How can TSG Help

TSG serves 1600+ clients. We have 90+ staff permanently assigned to supporting them. We invite every customer to score our response to every support call using the NPS methodology. 

NPS scores are calculated by asking customers a very simple question. Given your recent experience with TSG (their support call) would you recommend us to family or friends. They are invited to score you from 1 (no) through to 10 (yes). You take the % of 8/9/10 responses and deducted the % of 1,2,3 responses. The worst possible result is –100. The best possible result is +100.  

Over the last 12 months we have averaged +84. The industry standard is circa +30. + 60 is generally seen as extraordinary. I look at every score – every day. 

If you believe that your staff downtime is uncomfortably high – please get in touch.