1) Only existing equipment is covered and only in its current configuration. For all new user setups or replacement equipment you would be billed for all the labour to set it up. At first glance this seems fair enough, but this type of work makes up over 40% of all calls. You are therefore charged extra for each new user setup, each new PC, Laptop or Mobile Device setup and each piece of new or updated software. The list goes on. You will be charged for every one of these setup calls, even when completed remotely.

2) If a problem is diagnosed as un-repairable remotely, you will be charged a call-out fee for each site visit and a minimum of one hour’s labour. Under one particular contract a site visit would cost at least £138.00 !

4) Contracts were often priced per device rather than per user. So if you have a laptop and a PC then that’s an extra £10 per month.

5) There was typically no Server Monitoring in the contract, making it purely reactionary and not at all proactive. This will eventually result in disruption to you business that could otherwise have been avoided.

1)  Service Level Agreements - these vary wildly but a couple really caught our eye:

“We aim for this [our response time] to be one working day, but it is subject to engineer availability.” i.e. If there isn’t an engineer available, you’ll just have to wait.

“We are only required to achieve our stated SLAs in four out of five instances.”

Our favourite was a “4-Hour Response” defined as the “time we will take to log the call into our helpdesk system and provide you with a call reference number”, rather than any attempt at actually dealing with the problem!

2)  Some contracts exclude on-site time associated with hardware and warranty issues. This could cost the client dearly as we regularly get stuck for hours on long support calls to manufacturers’ call centres. In essence, this is really only a fixed priced contract for software support.

3)  Some contracts also have charges for “urgent” turnaround of faulty equipment. For example, one contract has a PC reload taking a week unless you pay the £250 expedite charge to get it back to you sooner.

4)  Disaster recovery is often just excluded completely. The one contract where it was included only covered work completed within business hours - unless you pay the uplift. This may be suitable for some businesses but would be a real disaster for others.

5)  Loan Equipment - most contracts included no loan equipment provision at all. It isn’t always useful, but sometimes it’s the easiest way to minimise disruption.