Greater emphasis on Support rather than IT skills

That’s a slightly provocative title for this blog. After all, there are two elements here. ‘IT’ refers to the technical bit, the ‘hard’ skills, while ‘Support’ speaks to the ‘soft’ skills of dealing with people, the context of any problem and managing it through to resolution.

For any given problem to be resolved within an acceptable time-frame requires the support person to be able to deliver on both counts equally well.

So why do we make the assertion that there is a greater emphasis on Support skills rather than IT skills?

The extended support mission of HTL’s IT Guys

Many IT Support companies are efficient and provide support to people with the appropriate qualifications. In part, it’s a fact that it is much easier to define the technical requirement of the support role in quantitative and qualitative terms.

It’s more subjective when we consider the support element. Presentable, good with people and communicative might all be desirable elements, however; they are harder to assess from the perspective of quantity and quality.

Over and above such basic prerequisites, as a business, HTL Support has an important philosophy. We extend the support mission to deepen the engagement between the client and our IT Guy that is assigned to your account. These may be summarised as:

• Acting as an extension of your internal team
• Getting to know your internal staff and developing acceptance as ‘one of the team’

• Understanding your business and where it is going
• Knowing the pains and problems and taking ownership of the IT dimension of any challenges

• Proactive involvement and help ensure IT moves with your business
• Being closely involved and seeking out how to design and use IT to better support your business strategy

To help us determine how well our IT Guys are doing in all aspects of their roles when embedded within our clients, we assess performance by using client satisfaction surveys. The feedback helps us to see how well we are doing in meeting our client’s needs and also determines the IT Guy’s performance-related part of their remuneration package.

Solving the need for more than just ‘IT Support’ with HTL

HTL Support services embed the IT expertise that our smaller and growing clients need to help take their businesses forward. To find out more about the value HTL’s IT Guys provide to clients, simply get in touch today.