// Managed IT
"15-minute response" is on half the IT websites in Auckland. Response is not resolution, and neither is the number that matters. The four numbers to ask for, the market norms in NZ, and DigitalShield’s own targets.
The short version
Response-time promises are the cheapest marketing in IT. A ticket system can auto-reply in one second, which technically meets a “15-minute response” with nobody awake. The numbers that decide whether your Monday is ruined are different ones, and most proposals do not volunteer them. Here is what to ask for and what the honest answers look like in New Zealand.
| Severity | Example | Response (acknowledged) | Engaged (a person working on it) | Resolution target |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Critical | Office offline; email down for everyone; ransomware | 15 min | 30 min, by phone | 4 hours or a workaround sooner |
| High | One person cannot work; a shared system degraded | 30 min | 1 hour | Same business day |
| Normal | A printer, a password reset, a slow laptop | 1 hour | 4 hours | Next business day |
| Request | New starter, new software, a change | 4 hours | Scheduled | Agreed date |
Those are DigitalShield’s own targets, and they are close to what the better Auckland providers deliver. If a proposal gives you one number for everything, ask for this table filled in.
The share of tickets fixed by the first person who picks them up, without escalation or a callback. Good NZ helpdesks run 70–80%. It is the number that most predicts how your staff feel about IT, because it is the difference between “sorted while I was on the phone” and “they’ll get back to me”.
Every number above is unverifiable unless the provider measures it and shows you. Ask for the monthly service report before you sign: tickets opened and closed, response and resolution by severity, first-call fix, the oldest open ticket. A provider that produces one already will send last month’s. One that goes quiet has told you something.
Not from the promise — from the design. Monitoring that catches the disk filling up before it fills. Patching that stops the breach rather than cleaning it up. A helpdesk that knows your environment because it manages all of it, not just the laptops. The fastest ticket is the one never raised, which is why one accountable partner across the whole stack produces better response numbers than five good suppliers each responding quickly to their own piece.
If you want to see what the table above looks like in practice, ask for a sample DigitalShield monthly report. If you want to compare it to what you get now, bring last month’s ticket list — we will go through it with you.
For a managed plan: acknowledgement within 15u201330 minutes in business hours, a technician engaged within one hour for a business-affecting issue, and most tickets resolved the same day. Critical outages u2014 the whole office down u2014 should see work start within 15u201330 minutes and a human on the phone immediately.
Response is when someone acknowledges the ticket; resolution is when the problem is fixed. A provider can promise a 15-minute response and take three days to fix anything. Ask for both, by severity.
Only if you pay for it, and only if you need it. Most 10u201350-person businesses need 24/7 monitoring (machines watching for problems) more than 24/7 helpdesk (people answering calls). The former is cheap and in the better plans; the latter is a cost that suits businesses that genuinely trade overnight.
Ask for the monthly report u2014 ticket volumes, average response and resolution by severity, first-call fix rate. A provider that measures it will show you; one that does not probably does not meet it.
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Read more →// Ready when you are
Tell us what your business runs on today. We will map what DigitalShield would cover, what it would cost per user, and what we would fix first — free, and in plain language.
