What Is A True Service Provider?

Lots of companies provide services to other companies… but what makes a good service provider?

Avid was started with the belief that service and support should extend to every user, providing service to every customer down to the handset on the desk. We also believe getting support should be easy—we have an “Avid” button on all of our IP phones that directly connects to our support team. When customers call, we answer their questions and provide advice when needed. All of this is included in basic service with Avid.

Recently, I saw a tweet from a competitor that provides Wi-Fi management as a service for $25/month. After reading their tweet, I realized they are charging for something that Avid provides free of charge when someone buys a Wi-Fi access point from us.

For the past few years, we’ve provided cloud-based management of Wi-Fi access points for all our customers. We do a lot of things at no additional charge. For those of you that are technical, we remotely diagnose radio interference, look at signal strength to individual devices, change SSIDs and passwords, look at bandwidth usage, set up secure guest networks and more.

Frankly, we never thought to charge for this–we implemented the cloud-based Wi-Fi management because it seemed like the best way to service our customers and the ever-increasing demands on Wi-Fi service within organizations. It’s a problem when Wi-Fi access stops working. It’s disruptive, frustrating and keeps people from getting their work done. We had to make sure we were proactively monitoring Wi-Fi access points as part of our service to our customers.

It’s important to us that our clients think we’re a good service provider. To make that a reality, we provide unlimited service and support for everything we sell, and we don’t charge additional fees when people ask for help.