Service Level Agreements
The Computer Doctors built their company on offering high-level IT support services that are customized to a customer's individual needs. Many of our customers like to pay for our services on a time and material basis, and we have tailored a number of support tiers to fit the needs of these customers on a straight hourly basis. Many of our other customers prefer to have a comprehensive contract with us that provides ongoing maintenance affordably, and allows them to plan a steady IT budget for the year with fewer headaches.
The Computer Doctors offers comprehensive service level agreements to help your growing business manage the complex world of IT. We make the complex SIMPLE! This document outlines the features of our comprehensive support agreement plans.
HOW THEY WORK
Our service level agreements are very simple plans. You, the customer, purchase a committed number of minimum labor hours per month at a greatly reduced rate. Because you are getting a steep discount on the rates, you are agreeing to commit to these hours for a minimum of 12 months, with our smallest tier agreement committing to just 1 hour minimum per month. Your account consultant can advise you of the number of recommended minimum hours to purchase based upon the size and complexity of your network.
You may use the labor hours any way you wish, as long as the work is computer related. That means you can use them for computer installation, maintenance, network setup and support, software questions, and remote access support. We will maintain your workstations, your servers, and your network infrastructure, and provide periodic preventative maintenance to keep your systems running in tip-top shape.
When you need help, you contact your dedicated support engineer directly at any time. You get special emergency contact phone numbers and an emergency email address that will get you right to your engineer without delay. Our response on support agreement customers takes priority over all other services we provide, so we get right to you on any critical issues.
If you don’t use all of the hours you purchased in a month, that’s okay! They simply roll forward to the next month. You can use your hours as you need them, or wait to use them until you have a big project to do.
If you exceed your committed hours for the month, you simply pay for additional hours at a discounted rate. Rates on our service contracts are discounted by as much as 30-50% over our normal Tier 3 priority rates, so it makes it easy for you to budget your IT costs and spread them out over the year.
If you need parts, you can buy them from us, or you can buy them from anyone else. We will install them for you and handle the details. We stock many types of parts and can save you some time, however, if you obtain your parts from us. We are competitive on parts prices and hand-pick the quality components we use and recommend.
If you need computer systems, we can provide these also. We hand pick the components that we use to build our custom systems. Our prices on computers are slightly higher than similar machines purchased on-line, however, we know what goes into them and stock the parts to fix them, and they are commercial-grade machines, meaning that they are not cheap home computers that will break down in a year’s time. Our commercial-grade computers have been known to last as long as 10 years when properly maintained! Additionally, we can customize the systems to fit the exact need of the application where they are going to be used.
We also give you 200 GB of off-site backup storage with your agreement.
When you want to renew your agreement at the end of the 12 month period, simply do nothing! It will automatically be renewed for another year!
PRICING
Our service level agreements are designed to be affordable, and help you manage your IT budget with predictability. The pricing for your service level agreement, and the overage rate, is based upon the number of hours you commit to per month. The more hours you commit to, the lower the hourly rate becomes. Here are just a few of the sample plans we have to offer:
So, for your four (4) hour per month contract, here is the pricing structure:
Committed monthly hours = 4
Monthly cost for committed hours = $300
Cost for each hour over 4 hours = $80 per hour
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!
Customers that sign up for our Service Level Agreements get a few extra bonuses.
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2 TB Free cloud backup storage
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You just have to buy the backup software each year, and pay a small startup fee which covers what the data center will charge for the ingress of a complete full backup done for the first time. If 2 TB isn't enough storage, we can upgrade your plan for a small additional fee priced per TB.
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Free network monitoring
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We also install network monitoring on your systems that will alert us if major network issues such as hackers, downed networks or servers, hung or high-CPU background processes, or widespread outbreaks of viruses take place for no extra charge. This allows us to be pro-active with protecting your network and prevent outages from affecting your business. We will do the monitoring for free--you just have to buy the monitoring software
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Periodic maintenance, cleaning, and optimization of all computers on premise
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Depending on the size of your plan, at least once per year we come around and clean and optimize all of your computers.
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10% labor discount for your employees
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For your staff's own personal or home computers if they bring them into our service centers (parts not included)
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SOME LIMITATIONS
We are an honest, down-to-earth company that likes for our customers to know all the facts. Because we are straight-forward with our customers, our customers love us and continue to retain us as their sole IT support. So we do want to let you know that we only impose just a few limitations and conditions on our support agreements. Basically, you can use your support hours any way you like, as long as it is a computer-related or network-related item that we are qualified to deal with. This means we can install computers, network equipment such as routers and switches, servers, cloud-based networks, web servers, or anything like these that you give us access to. If there’s anything we can’t handle ourselves, we will serve as the liaison between you and the individuals or companies that can help you, to allow you to concentrate on what you do best.
Examples of some items we can’t service ourselves:
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Digital copiers (although we can provide the network hookup to it)
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Major wiring jobs where a contractor should really handle the job (yeah, yeah, we are getting just too old to climb through attics --- but simple ones often are okay !)
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Printer breakdowns (although we can install consumables such as ink and toner)
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Certain specialized software programs (but we will work with your software company!)
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But, we can help you with just about everything else!
Also, we require you to commit for a minimum of 12 months. You can’t cancel the agreement before the 12 months is up without incurring a penalty. This is because we are providing you our highest level tier of priority service with our advanced tech team at a greatly discounted rate, while our non-contract customers often pay as much as nearly double that amount per hour for the same class and priority of service.
It might happen once in a while that a critical issue goes on for more than one day. While we anticipate this to be a rare occasion, this can happen if the remedy for the problem is not easily obtained, if third-parties need to be involved with an issue, or if we get shorthanded on staff either because of a sudden flood of critical issues such as following a major thunderstorm, or because your dedicated engineer may be out sick or otherwise unavailable, or if Acts of God such as hurricanes occur. So, while we are not required to have your problem fixed in 1 day, we must respond to your call for help in 1 day. If we cannot respond within 24 hours on a critical issue, you are entitled to compensation in the form of free labor hours. Your service agreement spells out for you how many of these you receive.
Non-critical issues reported are normally reported to us by customers by accumulating of list of these and having our engineer handle the entire list at one time. This tends to save on the number of hours used by minimizing special trips to your site, so you reduce the likelihood of running into overage time.
You will need to pay for some extra software that we get to install on all your systems to help us to secure, monitor, and maintain them. This includes security software such as antivirus and antimalware, remote control software so we can remotely maintain and monitor the performance of your systems, and backup software that will keep your data safe and sound. You can't opt out of this, and you can't substitute your own software for what we use---we like the software we use and we know that is is reliable. Your consultant will advise you on the annual cost for this software per machine.
We bill for our committed hours at the first of each month. Overage hours are billed as they are used. You either must pay your bill before the 15th of each month, or provide us a credit or debit card we can autobill.
THAT’S HOW SIMPLE IT IS!
We hope that this summary of our service level agreement offerings will help you in making your decision to adopt The Computer Doctors as your dedicated IT support company. We would love to add you to our growing family of pleased customers, and give you peace of mind with your computer network, and peace of mind with budgeting for your IT costs for the year.
Contact us for more information!
