Optimizing Your Enterprise IT Support Budget.

Your enterprise IT budget is the cornerstone of your success. Without the right preparation, you can’t properly prepare for future goals or initiatives. Without the right support services, you can’t handle issues ahead of time or when they appear, leading to stagnation and frustration. While many enterprises budget their support around the cost of Unified, there are other ways to improve your IT support budget without turning your processes on their head.

Everyone has experienced this at some point, if not regularly. You have a problem pop up around Teams or your cloud storage, so you create a ticket with Microsoft. You send the ticket off to Unified support in hopes of getting a prompt response so you can continue your workflow. Hours or, in some cases, days go by before you get an answer. That answer comes in the form of either:

• a definitive answer to your problem,
• an unhelpful response that goes over next steps for you and their team to solve the issue
• a response from an overseas technician on how they can help you.

Unified support is stretched thin handling tickets from around the world, which is why your wait times and resolution times are so inflated. The last few years have seen a rise in low-severity tickets being answered by overseas technicians, which puts you in a bind since this is noncompliant support.

This, coupled with the rising prices of Unified, leads to frustration for many enterprises. Why would you pay for services that are outsourcing your tickets or taking longer to respond while also raising their prices? Traditionally, because they are the only option (but not anymore).

As you know, the price of Unified is subject to change on a quarterly basis. It’s dependent on your Azure, server, and user spend, along with economic shifts in the industry and the world. All of this can lead to price increases of upwards of 15% in a single quarter. Your IT support budget was likely drafted up at the start of the year, meaning you’ll have to make some cuts if you want to get through the rest of the calendar unscathed.

You’re also paying for reduced response and resolution times. Some enterprises may remember the days of Premier when you had access to a dedicated TAM and had dedicated support hours and response times that made sense. Now, you get what you pay for, which for some companies isn’t much.

Unified has three tiers of support, with the most expensive option still falling short of the promised response and resolution times that Premier held. While this may be a symptom of Microsoft’s growing product line, you’re still a paying customer at the end of the day.

You deserve solutions that make sense and get to your tickets in a timely manner.

Picture a timeline where you didn’t have to worry about issues with your Microsoft products. Your cloud storage never had permissions issues; your Azure needs were always handled. All this because your support was proactive.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a timeline you’ll be living in under Unified since they mainly engage in reactive support. There’s no team dedicated solely to your needs and success, so when an issue pops up, it’s on you to approach Microsoft for a solution.

Now the affected service is down for hours or days, stalling your projects and leaving you frustrated. Stalled projects lead to fewer goals achieved, which is money down the drain.

US Cloud’s proactive support, by comparison, is more personal. We get to know your systems intimately and provide support across the board to get ahead of potential problems before they impact your bottom line. Our engineers have an average of 14 years of Microsoft product and service experience, so they’ve seen almost everything out there. We also stay current with the latest products, like Copilot, so you can rely on us to steer you into a more profitable future.

Lowering the cost of your Microsoft support starts by seeking out alternatives. You can haggle it out with Microsoft when it’s time to renew your contract, but the result will be the same.

The next 3-5 years will be spent bemoaning the same issues that have plagued you up to this point, so why not see what else is out there and how it can benefit your budget?

US Cloud is the leading third-party Microsoft Premier/Unified support alternative, offering companies the chance to save an average of 30-50% on their annual support budget. We do this through proactive support, rapid response, and speedy time to resolution.

Our team of experts gets to understand the ins and outs of your system so we can better prepare you for the future. We advise on how best to maneuver through your Microsoft landscape and when things get tricky, our team is here to assist.

Our financially backed SLAs guarantee that you see a response to tickets of all severities in 15 minutes or less, and our resolution times are, on average, twice as fast as Microsoft. Time is money, which is why we provide faster services for a fraction of the price.

Even if your budget is already set in stone, there’s always room for improvement. Microsoft is no longer the only option in the support space. When you need faster Microsoft support for less to optimize your IT support budget, US Cloud is the answer.

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