Iomart : What are IT support services? And what does an IT support person do?

If you think IT support services involve sitting behind a desk and staring at a screen all day, we're here to tell you that you're only half right. At iomart, our IT support people hold the title of 'Customer Support Engineers'-and they take on a huge variety of tasks and responsibilities for our customers, both software-based, and physical. The result is a fully managed IT support service for our customers.

Of course, there is a degree of the job that involves sitting at a desk and looking at not one, but multiple screens. However, alongside answering customer queries, our Customer Support Engineers build and configure servers, engineer cabling, and strip servers so that data can never possibly be recovered.

There are a host of other tasks that Customer Support Engineers carry out too, related to the managed services we offer, like security and cloud services -but the main thing to keep in mind is that although IT support services do require screens and desks, most of our Customer Support Engineers work from offices and spaces within close proximity to iomart's physical data centres which hold our all-important customer servers. Their expertise means that should a problem arise with any of our customer servers, the response times are super fast, rectifying customer issues as soon as possible-24/7.

It's true! Our Customer Support Engineers mostly work shifts of 7am - 7pm and four out of their 32 shifts per month are night shifts. Unlike some other lines of work, night shifts can be incredibly busy for our Customer Support Engineers and contractors. With fewer support requests coming in during the night, engineers get time to do cabling and head through to the data centres to carry out racking work and other hands-on jobs.

But what do Customer Support Engineers get up to day-to-day?

After a handover call at 7.15am (where night shift workers relay any issues or requests that came in overnight), technical leads work out which engineers will handle which requests. The rest of the day will be spent dealing with these issues as well as any other problems that might arise throughout the course of the day.

In their day to day tasks, Customer Support Engineers look after the physical and virtual environments of iomart's customers, upgrading memory and software to allow them to host websites, databases and other applications. One thing that Customer Support Engineers do not have is access to customer data. All data, although hosted in our data centres, is secure and cannot be viewed by our teams.

In what ways does having 24/7 IT support benefit our customers?

The fact that we have engineers onsite 24/7 means there is always an expert presence on hand to deal with any requests that come in via our helpdesk. Some customers (for cost-effectiveness) store their own equipment at our data centres rather than their own premises. If this is the case, they still have 24/7 access should they want it, however, some choose for our Customer Support Engineers to fix any issues that arise for them.

The great thing about our team of Customer Support Engineers is that each has their own field of expertise, which makes for a very varied skill set available to our customers. Despite being based in locations around the UK, the iomart team work closely with each other on Microsoft Teams and as a result, there will always be someone on shift (somewhere in the UK) that can resolve a customer issue.

That's why we consider IT support services to be vital for organisations. Our Customer Support Engineers provide 24/7 service and response, on-site presence and a dedicated, safe pair of hands that give customers complete peace of mind.

Although the dream customer for a Customer Support Engineer would be someone who understands the technicality of the hardware and software that they're using, that's not the reality. As a result, the team is well versed in working with everyone from IT novices to technical experts.

The role of IT support services has really changed in recent years, and there are always new ways of working and updates to hardware and software. That's why iomart provides space for Customer Support Engineers to constantly update and enhance their skill set to be the best possible asset to our customers. In each of the support bases are 'playground' areas where there's second-hand hardware for the engineers to experiment with. This allows our teams to continue learning and remain up to date with the latest developments in the industry.

If your organisation is looking for IT support, whether it's in Infrastructure,
Data Protection or even Connectivity-visit iomart.com/infrastructure for more information,
get in touch using our contact form or call on 0800 040 7228 to find out more.