Life is full of surprises – some good and some bad – and business is no different. When dealing with systems you don’t fully understand, these surprises can knock the wind out of you and seemingly come out of nowhere. That’s why many of RCI’s business telephone clients and others sign up for IT Maintenance Agreements.
Why IT Maintenance Agreements?
Getting your business a maintenance agreement is a little like getting yourself health insurance. You hope that you only use it once in a while for a check-up, but if something terrible happens, you’re quite relieved to have the coverage!
IT maintenance agreements help you plan for the costs of repairs and budget for them. That means if a surprise comes along, you’re already covered because you built it into your monthly expenses.
But maintenance agreements for your phones and other equipment have another benefit, too – they make major repairs less likely because you have your IT team checking on your equipment and keeping it up-to-date.
What is Included in an IT Maintenance Agreement?
So, let’s get down to the basics. What do you get with an IT Maintenance agreement?
The answer depends on what you sign up for, but one thing is for sure – with RCI, we will be clear from the beginning about what your IT maintenance contract includes and what it doesn’t.
For a baseline, general answer, your IT maintenance agreement will include repair or replacement for the parts listed on your contract. It will also generally also include preventative maintenance.
Finally, our IT maintenance agreements also include priority service.
What Is NOT Included?
The short answer to what isn’t included in your maintenance contract is anything not listed, but that’s a little glib. So let’s break it down.
Your contract does not include equipment RCI did not install or anything you chose not to include in your IT maintenance contract.
It also doesn’t include equipment broken because of misuse or “acts of god.” As a longtime RCI employee (not that), Steve Correll likes to say – “we don’t cover if you try to teach your phone how to swim.”
Types of Maintenance Agreements
RCI offers IT maintenance agreements for most of the equipment that we sell or service. Typically, we don’t offer maintenance agreements for equipment we did not install since we can’t vouch for how you treated it before.
Here are a few examples of our IT Maintenance Contracts.
Surveillance System Maintenance Agreements
With surveillance being a crucial element of many business safety and/or quality control systems, the loss of a camera, or worse, a whole surveillance system, can create a major liability and even danger.
A surveillance system agreement offers peace of mind and quick repairs or replacements when any element goes down. Typically, our surveillance system maintenance contracts will include repair or replacement of all cameras plus the NVR or DVR where you store video.
However, some may choose only to maintain certain critical parts of the system while leaving others to chance.
We can write up contracts to suit your needs.
Telephone System Maintenance Contracts
Despite doom prognosticators, the business telephone system remains alive and well! They may look a little different and include elements you’d never have seen in the 80s, like soft phones on PCs and mobile devices, but telephone systems remain a crucial part of business communication.
As such, business can slow significantly when one staff member is unable to transfer calls, check voicemail, or even communicate by voice to the outside world!
We offer telephone maintenance contracts for digital, VOIP, and cloud telephone systems. In the case of cloud systems, you have no telephone system on-site, so you do not need one included in the maintenance agreement. For the other two, a business will typically opt to include all telephone endpoints and system hardware in the maintenance agreement.
Other IT Maintenance Agreements
While surveillance and business telephone systems are our two most popular IT maintenance contract offerings, we can also create maintenance agreements to suit your particular business needs.
That may mean including items like wireless access points, door phones, or special equipment unique to your particular business. They may also include a combination of several of the other IT maintenance agreements we typically sell.
What If You Don’t Get an IT Maintenance Contract?
While some IT companies require you to sign a maintenance agreement to work with them, RCI does not. If you choose not to get a maintenance contract, we’ll still work on your equipment on a time and materials basis.
With that said, we believe maintenance contracts are effective as preventative tools to keep your IT operations at full capacity. We recommend them to our customers but won’t penalize them if they don’t choose to take advantage.
