Trying and Loving Outsource Technical Assistance

Outsource Technical Assistance

- Lessons Learned, Episode 51

 

As our business grew and we evolved from a first-generation remote managing system to a newer hosted service, we found ourselves gradually doing something we had not anticipated: Outsourcing a good deal of our tech support! Here’s how it happened and what we learned.

Our first RMM was the now-old school first generation of Kaseya. It required a dedicated onsite server with SQL licenses. It was expensive to buy and expensive to run. Eventually, that server got old. And since the industry had evolved, we decided to look for a hosted alternative. Even if the RMM was going to cost about the same, we’d save the $10K investment in a server. ($10K at the time, not today’s dollars.)

After doing some research and trying several things, we settled on Zenith Infotech (now Continuum). But Kaseya was stable and we were pleased with it’s performance if not the total cost of ownership/investment. So we decided to deploy Zenith agents on all of our servers along with the Kaseya agents. Our goal was to verify that Zenith caught everything Kaseya did.

In last week’s blog post, I talked about peer groups. I walked through my strategy of trying both products side by side before deploying to all the desktops and discovered that several people I respected and trusted were doing the exact same thing. That helped me feel better, and several of us started checking in with one another on a regular basis to verify that our experiences were similar.

And then something happened. I was talking to my Zenith rep and mentioned that we see very few “blue screens” on our servers, so our techs didn’t have much experience dealing with them. That meant that either Manny or I had to address every blue screen. My rep said, “Assign those to us. I promised we’ll find the problem fast. And, if you want, we can fix it fast too.” This was intriguing because Zenith had a lot of engineers who deal with blue screens all the time. They would obviously be faster and analyzing them.

We agreed to try this. We set up a separate “Back office” board in Connectwise where we sent tickets for Zenith. We tried a few things, like sending them blue screens, and they did a good job. Fast and efficient on both the analysis and the fix (unless the fix required hardware, then we threw the ticket back to our primary board).

Gradually, we tried other things. Updating drivers. Verifying updates or scheduled tasks. I think we paid $39 per month preserver, which covered pretty much anything that falls into the category of maintenance. So we added more and more. We do a very thorough monthly maintenance for all clients. (See https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/2025/01/regular-monthly-maintenance-lessons.html.) We started assigning many of these tasks to Zenith.

We assigned more and more maintenance tasks to Zenith (we called the service “back office”). Eventually, they were able to follow our process and complete everything on the monthly maintenance except change the tape or disc drive for the backup testing. We got a lot of labor for our $39!

We pushed Zenith to the limit. We assigned them service pack installations, which required a few reboots in the early 2000’s. They took a while to complete and needed to be monitored. They also required patience as some servers (such as SBS) might take 45 minutes to reboot with upgrades like this.

The worst thing we assigned to them was a major service pack update an SBS 2003 server, which included major updates to the server itself, SQL, and Exchange. Many, many reboots were required. And here’s the “worst” part: This client was way outside of town on a sod farm and the only Internet they could get at the time was a bonded DSL line rated at about 192Kbps. It was a bit like building a ship in a bottle from halfway around the globe.

We replace all desktop and server RMM agents with just Zenith.

Eventually, we turned over as much as we could to Zenith. We did not let them work directly with clients, but we gave them all the jobs that could be done without talking directly to clients. Above, I talked about how much we use relied on administrative assistants to help us with support (see https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/2025/10/front-office-staff-and-admins-rule.html). Now we adopted two rules to guide us:

1. If it can be done by an admin instead of a tech, assign it to the admin. Else …

2. If it can be done by Zenith, assign it to Zenith.

 

Great Results, But Enough is Enough – Lessons Learned

Lesson One: Your outsourced tech support is part of your team. Treat them that way. We had to work with Zenith and various technicians for some time to make sure that their processes and documentation were consistent with our requirements. For our part, we committed to providing very detailed requests, with checklists if possible. We treated them with respect and made sure that their technicians liked working with us.

Lesson Two: There are limitations. Unexpectedly, we pushed Zenith so hard that we helped them learn the limits of their service. Eventually, we all agreed on some lines to define what is maintenance and what is not. Their original plan covered “everything.” Well, you know how I feel about all you can eat. It turns out we ate all the profit on our account and more. Then we helped them set reasonable, maintenance-focused limitations.

Lesson Three: Outsourced tech support should be embraced. We treated the Zenith team like an employee. We set standards and expectations, helped them to be successful, and evaluated their performance. More importantly, this “one” employee could do a great deal more work than any other employee.

This was a higher level of leverage than we expected, and it allowed us to take on more clients without hiring as many tech. And our in-house techs were freed from mundane chores so they could focus on interesting work.

That’s just our experience. Your mileage may vary. But don’t write off outsourced help until you’ve tried it.

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Notes on monthly maintenance:

Here’s my sample Monthly Maintenance Checklist: (less than $5)

https://store.smallbizthoughts.com/product/sop-monthly-maintenance-checklist/

 

… Which is based in part on my FREE 68-point checklists. You should probably look at both version 3 and version 4. Three is very much the core “68-point checklist.” Version Four is much expanded and detailed, and is a thorough checklist, not just the basics.

https://store.smallbizthoughts.com/product/karls-famous-68-point-checklist-version-4/

https://store.smallbizthoughts.com/product/karls-famous-68-point-checklist-version-3-0/

 

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Episode 51

 This Episode is part of the ongoing Lessons Learned series. For all the information, and an index of Lessons Learned episodes, go to the Lessons Learned Page. https://blog.smallbizthoughts.com/p/lessons-learned-blog-series.html

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