Labour only support agreement

Our labour only service is designed to be extremely straight forwards and has been around for nearly 10 years which means that it is very well tried and tested.  The over riding idea of this service is that you buy a set number of hours per month and if you don’t use these hours they role over and accumulate indefinitely.  We firmly believe that once you try our service you won’t want to change to another supplier and thus there is no contract tying you in for a year but instead we have a rolling monthly agreement that can be terminated with only 30 days notice.

Using this support agreement companies find it very easy to give us a try knowing that if things don’t work out they have not committed them selves to a long term contract.

The great thing about this sort of agreement is that the hours you purchase can be used for any IT related work either onsite or remotely and thus if you have built up a reserve of hours they can be used for project work and not just for when things go wrong.

With our labour only agreement you can choose between a reactive or proactive service although it is highly recommended that all companies opt for a proactive service. 

New equipment can be sourced directly from us at competitive prices or you can source from your own preferred supplier and we will be happy to install it for you once it has been delivered.

The following section provides further details of our labour only support agreement: -

Scope of cover

The support cover is designed to provide a single point of contact for any IT related problems so that in effect we can either become your complete IT department or for larger companies an additional resource to be called upon as and when required.  Telephone support provides a first line of contact to try and resolve an issue immediately but should this not resolve the problem then we will arrange for an engineer to come out on site.  Below are examples of how support time can be used: -

Contract

Our support service is based around a 1-month rolling agreement.  There is no long term contract to sign (we do ask you to read and sign a copy of our terms and conditions) as we feel that the onus is upon us to maintain a level of service that you are happy with so all the while you are paying the monthly invoices and you are happy with our work we are in agreement.  Should you decide to stop using this service then all we require is a letter stating that you wish to terminate the agreement.  Any invoices that have already been issued will need to be paid and any banked hours will be lost.

Reactive or Proactive

As your support company we can work in a couple of ways.  The first way is on a reactive basis where you contact us in the event of a problem.  With this sort of service you play a more active role in your own IT but have the piece of mind that in the event of a problem that you cannot deal with you have access to professional help. 

The second approach is a proactive service.  This works on the basis of regular maintenance visits where we run through a range of pre determined checks to make sure that all aspects of your system are running as they should be.  As well as system checks we run any critical updates that are required and confirm that the system is as secure from outside threats as possible.  Monthly Maintenance visits are recommended but can be bi monthly or quarterly should you wish.  Another alternative is to combine a labour only agreement with part of our managed support service which would then allow us to remotely maintain your network.

News emails

Periodically we send out emails that cover subjects that may have an effect on your business, these can include special offers on equipment, instructions on protecting against current virus threats and current topical IT news.

 Cost

The cost of the support is based on a monthly retainer fee, which covers a pre set amount of time.  This time does not have to be used each month, as any unused time will automatically be rolled forwards into the following months allowance but you must always purchase the minimum of 1 hour per month to stay in the agreement.  All time that is bought under the support and maintenance contract gets a discount which depends upon the amount of time you agree to purchase upfront on a monthly basis.  All discounts are against our standard ad hoc onsite hourly rate of £70.00. 

Discount structure

Any excess time that you use is chargeable at your effective hourly rate so should you need to use our services beyond the time you have accumulated this will simply be billed through as excess time on your following months support and maintenance bill.

Response times

Support hours are between 9.00am and 5.30pm Monday to Friday.  The following figures are an indication of the longest time that you could expect to wait for a response to your problem.  An escalated response time will always be given for critical equipment such as a server or any situation that is causing a complete loss of IT service and while we quote a figure of 4 hours we are often onsite within a couple of hours.

In most cases an engineer is able to deal with your problem remotely and as such it is likely that you will receive an immediate solution without the need to send an engineer out.

Travel Time

For each onsite call out there will be a fixed amount of travel time that is booked to the job, which will depend on your location.  The amount of time booked is not intended to cover the full amount of travel time but to cover the cost to the company for the engineer’s time & mileage charges.  Generally the amount of time booked to an area will be half of the average round trip travel time but to make things easier areas will be banded into quarter hour, half hour, three quarter hour and 1-hour travel charges.  Anything that is outside of our normal working area will be billed at the full travel time plus mileage at 0.40pence per mile

To download a copy of the full terms and conditions please click here