Many businesses hire external IT support. It makes sense. You’re not an IT expert yourself, so you want to hire experts to take care of that side of your business. It’s a common choice, and when a good partnership is struck, it really is best for your business.

But, how do you know that you’re getting good IT help?

One easy check is to look at the experience level of your technicians. What do they know? What have they seen? What qualifications and certifications do they carry?

For a good managed IT provider, every single technician will carry basic certifications. That doesn’t mean that every problem is necessarily solved by the most experienced technician in the company, though. If you really want to know how much experience you should expect from your technicians, you have to take a deeper look at how IT support really works.

What Is the Experience Level of Technicians You Will Work With? 

It’s a fair question. When you pay for access to technical expertise, you want to know that you’re getting a good value.

Frustratingly, the true answer to this question is that it depends. The experience of your technician will be related to the work they are doing and the help they are providing.

If you just need to reset your password, then an entry-level technician can handle that process. It doesn’t require extensive experience in troubleshooting and problem-solving. In fact, it’s the most common problem in all of IT support.

If your company servers are being ransomed by a malicious attack, then you want high-level experts handling the issue, and that’s exactly what you will get. The experience of the technician will always be appropriate for the nature of the work they are providing.

The Importance of Routing Tickets and Incidents 

This brings up an interesting point. Tickets and incidents require routing. The way it works is that you let us know that you need help with something — whether that is a password reset, a major security breach, or anything in between.

When you contact us, we create a ticket, and depending on the scale of the issue, we might also create an incident report (typically tickets are for issues that only impact one user while incidents impact multiple users, possibly the whole company).

The information in those tickets and reports tells us what kind of technician is needed to resolve the situation. Those needs might include high-level technical specialties and official job titles. It all depends on what is wrong.

By routing tech help in this way, we can keep things efficient. It minimizes wait times and downtime associated with tech problems, and it allows us to deliver the appropriate level of help as soon as you need it.

What Are the Various Levels of Experience?

With that in mind, we can ask the obvious question. What levels of experience exist among our IT staff? We break it into four categories, or tiers one through four. At each tier, you get more experience, specialization, and general ability to resolve even the most complicated technical problems.

Tier 1

First up is tier 1 support. This is the lowest level of support that we offer, and the technicians carrying out this support have the lowest levels of experience and expertise. That is not a suggestion that they are in any way unqualified.

Tier 1 technicians are known as client service technicians. They are often fresh out of school, and they will have at least some entry-level certifications, such as an A+. Tier 1 technicians handle about 60 percent of client issues, as they handle the bulk of help desk support.

Such support relates to the most common and well-understood issues that clients might face. Help desk support might involve resetting a password, adding your email to your phone, getting a device connected to Wi-Fi, assistance with mail or message filters, and things of that nature.

Tier 1 support is not handling mission-critical systems that can make or break the entire company. They’re resolving individual issues with individual workers in the business, and these are problems of an entry-level nature. They are more than qualified for this work, and if they come across an issue that is beyond their current skill set, they have ample escalation support available.

Tier 2

Tier 2 personnel are what are commonly known as service desk technicians. To get to this point, they have one to three years of experience in this kind of IT. They will have multiple certifications, including entry-level certifications and some intermediate qualifications as well.

Tier 2 is there specifically to handle more complicated individual issues. Such problems might include performance issues on a device or software package, mail flow problems, individual security issues, etc.

Tier 2 technicians are in place to support and aid tier 1 technicians as needed. Some issues go straight to tier 2, as they have more specialized skills that are equipped to handle such problems.

Overall, tier 2 technicians spend their time in a mix of functions — some of which interact directly with clients and others that interact with other technicians.

Tier 3

Tier 3 is where you get to system administrators. There are IT experts with three to seven years of experience, multiple mid-level certifications, and established specialties. At this point of escalation, you aren’t dealing with a jack of all trades. You’re dealing with an industry expert who has a specialty related to the problem at hand.

Such specialties might include networking, server and cloud management, security, or a number of other areas.

In general, clients do not interact directly with tier 3 support. Instead, the network administrators will organize the lower-tier techs to gather any and all information required for solving a problem. 

When the occasion calls for it, tier 3 technicians will provide direct support to clients. This means that the problem is unusual and tricky to solve, but these are experts with the right skills and resources to solve such problems.

Tier 4

Last up is tier 4. These are system engineers, and that title is not given out lightly. These are professional specialists. They have advanced certifications and often specialized degrees to go with them.

Our system engineers are organized into two teams: implementation and support.

The implementation team, as the name suggests, is dedicated to the sole purpose of rolling out new software and/or hardware. They don’t work on help desk problems at all. Instead, their focus on implementation allows them to roll out changes expediently, and as a result, they minimize any downtime associated with new technology.

The support team is equally qualified as compared to the implementation team, but the support team has a different role. Their purpose is to provide the final line of troubleshooting. It is exceedingly rare for a client to interact directly with tier 4 support. Instead, these engineers are taking a deep look at very specific and unusual problems. As the saying goes, “They deal with the weird stuff.”

Tier 4 support has the skills necessary to create unique solutions to problems if necessary. They’re the final resource for a good reason.

Arrange for High-Level Tech Support Today

If you like the idea of having such a robust support team at your disposal, then you’re in luck. You can contact Acropolis Technology Group today. We’ll discuss how your business works and what kinds of support you might need. With an expert consultation, we can help you explore support options that are available.

Once you settle on the support that you want, we’ll partner with you to provide it as needed. You can have access to industry experts, on the schedule that you choose, and it all starts with a single conversation. If you want to take great care of your business’s technology resources, we’re here to help.