The following letter was originally sent to our clients via email March 11, 2020.
To Our I.T.S. Client Family:
The topic on everyone’s mind is the coronavirus. We understand that, and we’ve been monitoring its progress closely while formulating a plan for how to deal with it as an organization. We hold the health and safety of our employees—and yours—in the highest regard, so we want to share the details of that plan with you.
- More than 94% of client issues are successfully resolved remotely. You create a support ticket, and our engineers do what’s necessary to solve the problem without having to roll a truck to your site. This is the optimal scenario for you because it’s by far the fastest way to tackle I.T. problems. Our remote support will continue throughout the Covid-19 crisis.
- Occasionally I.T. problems require our onsite intervention. Due to the escalating incidence of coronavirus infection, we will continue to provide onsite support for critical issues only. We define a critical issue as your network goes down, your core business application fails to work for key employees, and other issues of that nature.
- Issues of a non-critical nature that require onsite intervention will be scheduled and dealt with once the public health crisis has abated. This is for the protection of your employees as well as ours, since our engineers visit ten different locations in a typical week.
- Please note, to a large extent we’ll be working on the honor system as we execute this plan. We will do everything we can to keep your technology environment humming along, and we ask that you limit your characterization of “critical” issues to only those that have a material impact on your ability to function. We promise to get to the “nice-to-have” problems after the crisis has passed, but need to limit our engineers’ exposure to those “need-to-have” problems only for the time being.
- Depending on the nature of the critical problem, we may request access to your workspace before or after the main business hours. This will minimize the kind of close contact health officials have been discouraging.
- A few days ago, we sent an email encouraging you to consider your ability to have your employees work remotely should the Covid-19 problem continue to worsen. We stand ready to help steer that initiative from the technical side. Just call us.
- In the meantime, we remind you to ask your employees to wipe down their keyboard, mouse, and any other surface they touch regularly. Those two peripherals, in particular, are traditionally among the most frequent infection vectors in office environments.
We never expected to be confronting this type of challenge, and we want to get it right. Your feedback can help. So please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or if there’s anything we missed.
Be well,
Deana and Jason Pizzo
