I've just had an interesting story told to me by a co-worker who used to work in a more isolated situation. Their IT support was outsourced to a specialist company, and he was particularly impressed by the level of service they gave to their printers. Every morning someone would be around to load them with paper, he says, and again at lunchtime for the heavily-used ones. If one of them broke, there was a backup next to it, but the failure meant flying someone in to physically fix it.
Here in the middle of Brisbane's business district, we have less reliable printers and slower service. Why? My first impression is that when the location is remote, and particularly when failure means paying for a flight, the cost of failure is higher, so it pays them to provide better preventative maintenance. In the city, the cost of failure is lower, because six people are within walking distance of fixing that printer, so up-front preventative measures are not as valuable, but just as expensive.
Mokalus of Borg
PS - That's my impression, anyway.
PPS - The reality may be vastly different.
2 comments:
That still doesn't explain why it takes so long for service people to make it to the city office.
Higher density of equipment in a smaller area? If they know it's going to break down, why not employ the right amount of people? Or make their product quality better?
I'm not against rural communities having good service, but when my business is likely to be providing more business but is receiving less quality service, something is going wrong.
I admit this doesn't explain why service takes longer in the city than the country, but it might explain the mindset behind the cause. It's closer and more convenient to fix, so it doesn't seem as urgent. Maybe?
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