You arrive at your meeting room for an important presentation, only to find that your audiovisual system isn’t working…

There’s no other room available…

A colleague is feverishly pushing all the buttons on the remote control…

A guy from IT, who thinks he has the world’s best home theatre system, is pulling cables from the back of the screen….

Your visitors are in reception and no-one can fix the problem…

Well… searching the Yellow pages might just provide a solution, if you wanted a plumber! However, any organisation which depends on its audiovisual systems to deliver good quality services should have proper arrangements in place for their on-going support. You have to be sure you've got someone reliable, professional and competent to turn to if things go wrong.

In many organisations there is a cultural problem, where the importance of fully operational audiovisual solutions is not clearly recognised across the business. Of course it would be good if you had someone on your staff who could deal with every problem, but even the biggest companies find it hard to cope with everything in-house.

Historically organisations have relied on IT staff, who constantly fiddle with the audiovisual systems and often cause more problems than they fix. Contemporary audiovisual systems are simply too specialised and problems are too inter-dependant on multiple technologies to sustain in-house staff with adequate skills. The guy from IT may be great at fixing computers but you wouldn’t ask him to repair your plumbing!

In the long-run, it is far more cost effective to contract external specialist support to be available as and when you need it. However, reliable support isn't cheap or easy to find, so what can you expect and how can you make the best use of it?

So what's the conclusion?

• Good support depends as much on you as it does on your support company.
• Most of what you require in-house isn't very technical but is based on good administration and knowing how to get help.
• Maintain a good relationship with your support company - a dedicated liaison is essential.
• You'll have to pay for good quality support - but then what’s the potential cost of that messing up that meeting?

"A relationship for life…, not just the lifecycle" is a firm Netpractise philosophy. We believe in providing comprehensive and on-going maintenance and support services for all of our solutions. Ensuring the on-going application functionality of your multimedia system is extremely important to us and our clients highly value our on-going involvement. Netpractise offers a range of Maintenance and Support solutions, to protect your investment.