SWITCHING IT PROVIDER
Discover how we ensure a smooth transition of service when switching to Akita, and how we support your organisation’s growth and success.
Change Your IT Support Provider With Confidence
Organisations can reach a point where they know their existing in-house or external IT solution is no longer right for them.
Whether it’s repeated poor response times, a major project failure, high costs or an obvious skills gap, signs will be there that the relationship needs to end.
But there can still be hesitancy to make the change, fearing the stress, difficulty or time pressures of doing so.
With the right partner, none of these things need to be a concern. Discover below how Akita’s professional service takes the stress out of moving IT partner:
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How We Help Organisations To Switch IT Provider
As an experienced IT partner, we make it as easy as possible for organisations to transition to our service.
We utilise an industry-standard software solution for storing information on your systems and setup. This means that moving all of your key information to us might only take a few clicks.
Discover more in our video:
Four Steps To Switch IT Support
Phase 1: Pre-Onboarding Assessment
We’ll introduce you to our onboarding engineer and your account manager. We’ll obtain key system information from the current IT provider, and work to understand wider third-party services (such as connectivity, telecoms and printers) that may be relevant to IT support.
Phase 2: Transition Process
Transition dates are agreed with you. We then conduct a transition day to deploy software to be able to deliver support from Day One, as well as discover any specifics about the way you want to be supported. Technical system information is populated into our IT Glue management system ready for use by our helpdesk team, and they’ll also be educated about any specifics of your IT support
Phase 3: Go Live Process
Our IT support service goes live, with communications sent to explain that Akita is your new IT support partner and how to contact us. Our onboarding engineer will take the final steps to ensuring that your systems are secure and any legacy passwords have been changed.
Phase 4: Post Go-Live
Your account manager is available at any time once live but will specifically book a meeting one month into support to ensure everything is progressing smoothly. Subsequent checks will also be performed at 2 and 6 months by our customer service team members to ensure you’re satisfied with the service and account management.
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What To Consider When Choosing An IT Support Provider?
What should you look for in a new IT support partner? Here’s our list of key credentials:
Response Time
Many IT providers claim to offer responsive IT support. But can they prove that?
Response times are built into our Service Level Agreement (SLA) contract, ensuring all issues are addressed within less than two hours. In reality, it's typically much faster than this (our current average is around 35 minutes).
Plus, we also prioritise IT support issues based on their severity. So if your issue is business-critical, we’ll be sure to help you first.
Proactive Approach
Responsive service is one thing. But it’s more effective if problems don’t arise in the first place.
Our proactive support approach is effective in helping organisations reduce IT-related business disruption.
From monitoring systems performance and patching software to ensuring that updates take place outside of work hours, we save our customers time and money.
Scalability
A good IT provider should have the capacity to support your success, no matter how large you grow.
Akita has a team of over 40 IT engineers and consultants, and support organisation of up to 500 people without an issue. So your organisation can do a lot of growing, safe in the knowledge we’re there to support you.
But support shouldn’t be the only way an IT provider offers scalability…
Services
A professional IT partner should have the skills and services to be able to help its customers to develop and enhance their systems and setup.
Akita offers over 40 managed services that serve organisations from start-up to enterprise in size, covering everything from basic IT requirements to unified communications, consultancy and advanced business systems.
By switching IT provider to Akita, you’ll have a partner whose services and expertise can scale with you.
Price
When it comes to IT service costs, consider value rather than price.
At Akita, we know there are cheaper providers in the market. But we also know they can't deliver to our level of service or talent. And because we hear from them, we also know they don't keep their customers happy for long!
Our service delivers value to our customers by not only fixing issues, but preventing them in the first place. And we see how our services help our customers to grow and succeed.
We see this as the value we add. And from the 200+ five star reviews we’ve received from our customers, we think they see it too.
Why Choose Akita?
Broad Industry Experience
As an IT company with over 25 years of experience, we have experience in supporting a wide range of sectors and industries.
Not only do we have a good understanding of the pressures and best practices of each industry, we’ve learned new tricks from every one we’ve worked with that we are then able to share with our other customers.
Currently, we support organisations spanning industries including accountancy, insurance, financial services & banking, real estate, legal, education, health, defence, print, construction, aerospace & airports, transport, manufacturing & engineerig, automotive, facilities management, consultancy and more.
Simplifying Migration Of Microsoft Licensing & Wider Software
More than day-to-day IT support, organisations are often concerned about switching suppliers because of licensing related to Microsoft 365 and similar software.
This isn’t completely unfounded: while most software can be brought across with ease, Microsoft licensing used to be difficult to move, and the overall ownership could impact the ability to support an organisation.
However, changes to Microsoft 365 licensing now make it simple to migrate licensing to a new partner mid-term. And given that Akita is an accredited Microsoft solutions partner, we can undertake this on your behalf with ease.
Once complete, we can provide a health check on your Microsoft 365 tenant, reviewing your Microsoft Secure Score, and making overall improvements to your licensing.
Want to know more about what we can do for Microsoft licensing? Get in touch:
Start A ConversationSwitching IT Provider
What Are The Common Concerns About Switching IT Partner?
We hear lots of reasons why organisations are afraid to switch, even after 100% price rises! Here’s a summary of the most common reasons we hear – and what we say in return:
“A new IT provider won't know our systems”
It’s true that every IT system is set up in a different way. And it’s for this reason that Akita devotes time at the start of a new relationship to learning systems, documenting admin rights, and reviewing setup in-line with organisational goals.
In doing so, we’ll often review systems that haven’t been audited in years. So, it’s fairly common to discover ways to improve organisations’ IT setups or enhance their security.
So if anything, switching IT provider to Akita should make your systems better.
“How do we know if our new IT provider has the right skill set?”
This is a legitimate concern with smaller IT support providers. And in our time, we’ve seen some terrible setups where IT partners have tried to hide their lack of skills.
Akita works with organisations of all sizes and across practically every industry, so we have experience in a vast range of systems, software and solutions. With more than 50 expert IT engineers and consultants, we carry a huge breadth of experience and skills.
But in the very rare case that we encounter something new to us, we’re humble enough to say so. So if there’s that one niche piece of software you really need help with, we’ll put our best people on the job to learn how we can help you.
“Switching IT provider is going to involve lots of effort on our part”
Your time is valuable, and you don’t have much to spare for a new IT provider. That’s why Akita’ transition of service model is designed to let us take on the hard work.
We’ll document your systems, catalogue licences and hardware, and review your setup. We’ll obtain all relevant information from your current IT provider and even inform relevant third-party service providers (phone systems, internet providers, print suppliers etc.) that we’re now managing your IT.
We will want to spend some time with you – but only to understand your organisation’s goals and how we can help you achieve them. But you can leave the IT-side of things to us.
“Our old IT provider will cause us problems”
If your current IT provider tries to make it difficult to leave, it usually confirms that you’re making the right decision.
But you don’t need to worry. As part of our transition of service process, we handle all of the technical elements of switching IT provider. This includes obtaining relevant passwords and access rights from your old provider and migrating any licences to our care. Just leave it to us to get the information we need.
And whatever your old IT provider says, remember you were only paying for their services – YOU own YOUR IT systems. No one can legally withhold your data or threaten to turn services off prematurely.
“Moving our data to you will be difficult”
Not at all. We use an industry-standard software solution to hold all of our customers’ systems documentation.
If you’re moving to us from an established IT provider, there is a good chance your data is already in this system and so easily portable. Moving your data should only take a few clicks.
If data is not in that system, don’t worry – we have staff members dedicated to capturing all the information we need to support you, and adding it in an orderly way. They’ll do the work so you won’t have to.
And in the (unlikely) event that you choose to leave our support one day, we’d be able to securely provide all of this information to your next support solution in this widely-recognised format. So you don’t need to worry about your data being tied up.
What Our Customers Say
Ready To Change Your IT Support? Speak To Akita
Having helped hundreds of organisations move over to our service, our process for bringing new customers on board with as little hassle as possible is well-refined.
We’ll obtain all information about your systems from your current IT provider, and transfer any relevant licences or cloud services. We’ll even introduce ourselves to your other 3rd party suppliers (telecoms, internet etc.) so we can help you manage these services too.
One of our consultants will then spend time learning your internal processes, ensuring we know how you work so we can support that.
And we’ll also draw up a roadmap on how systems can be improved, aligning this to your organisational goals.
Need some proof points? Read our reviews:
Our Reviews 