If you are still waiting for your technology to break before you call your computer support company to work on your technology, you probably believe that the entire cost of dealing with technology problems in listed on the bill that is sent to you after the problem is resolved. And while that clearly represents the cost of work done on your behalf, it is probably far from the total cost of your computer problem.

Suppose you arrive at your office at 8am to find that your server isn’t working properly. Your staff starts to arrive and they are unable to get email, work on documents, or schedule appointments. Worse yet, they can’t see the appointments that are scheduled for this morning, so no one is really sure where they should be.

You place a call to your computer support company and are told that they can’t have anyone onsite before 10am. Once onsite, the problem turns out to be fairly simple and by noon, your server is running properly and your staff is able to get to work – at least those who aren’t at lunch.  Your computer support company sends you a bill for two hours of onsite time and travel. The invoice total is $400 and you consider this a rather inexpensive repair.

And if you only look at the hard costs of the repair, you are correct.

But you also need to consider the soft costs associated with lost productivity and your inability to service your clients. Perhaps you also failed to show up for scheduled meetings and prospects are questioning whether they should hire your firm or your competition.

If you have 20 employees and you pay them an average of $15 per hour, you have just spent an additional $300 per hour for employees who weren’t actually able to work.  The network was down for 4 hours, so the total cost for unproductive employees is $1200. Of course, you need to consider taxes and benefits as well, let’s say that is 30% of wages, so you need to add another $360 of costs there, for a total of $1560 in lost productivity.

It’s more difficult to attach a dollar figure to the damage done because of your inability to service your clients. Perhaps you will lose a client, or maybe you lose a big sale, adding even more to the cost of being down.

Most business owners ignore the soft costs associated with downtime and keep paying for service when things aren’t working. Smart business owners instead contract with a computer network support company (like this mid-Michigan computer support company) that provides managed services under a fixed fee arrangement. While you may pay a bit more to your computer support company for this type of service, you will experience far less down time and avoid the more expensive soft costs of unplanned downtime.

Best of all, your computer support company will be focused on making your system run as smoothly as possible. If you have fewer problems, they will make fewer service calls and they will make more money. Instead of hoping that you have a problem that generates billable hours, they will be focused on making sure that your systems are up and running so they won’t have to make a service call.

This article was contributed by KI Technology Group. They are a managed services provider in East Lansing that specializes in providing technology solutions to small businesses with 10 to 150 employees.