Lesson two: Do enough research. As a tech support person, do you subscribe to news feeds and blogs about the products you support? Do you spend time each day reading articles and books related to the products you support? Have you set up a virtual lab using VMWare, VirtualPC, or Xen so you can experiment and test your solutions before you offer them to your users? Knowledge is power and the more knowledge you have, the more you'll be empowered to delight your users with relevant, accurate solutions.
And then along comes someone else. Amazon, and their attractive EC2 services. I discovered EC2 late one night while surfing the internet. We spoke. And I was so enamored that I wrote about them in a blog on this very website only a few weeks ago. EC2 seemed like an easy and affordable way for a small company to take their business into the cloud. "No more in-house servers." I reported. "No more tech support I.T. No more Windows headaches. 100% access all the time. From anywhere." Admittedly, I was smitten.
Hands-on tech support I.T service is expensive to provide long term. Hint: Dell, HP and eMachine are investing millions in low-cost "over the phone" help desk support. They are not hiring as many "boots on the ground" technicians as before. This means that when you do get a problem that requires a little hands-on work, you go on a long waiting list.
Mainly because the hardware and software is so sophisticated that non experts find it difficult to wring the best out of it. The systems needs to be properly configured and integrated together Managed I.T support uttah hence the increasing IT Service costs.
One of the biggest problems in selling our services is lack of patience. It's very common to "try" a marketing effort once, and abandon it immediately out of disappointment at the lack of results. What happens then is a round of single efforts, with no long-term commitment to any marketing strategy. "Marketing" then becomes a series of failed experiments, none of which lasted long enough to give them a fair test of effectiveness. Impatience will never bring you the clients you want. Your target market needs to become familiar with you, your business, and the details of your service. This takes time. Marketing requires patience.
Oh, wait - I forgot one more question. It's very critical. Here it is: ask your host - and carefully repeat this after me verbatim - "Will you feed my ice cream in bed every night and then give me a..." woops, nevermind, wrong subject.