Service has slipped. What do I do before I fire you?

Service relationships decay quietly. Nobody announces it. Responses get a little slower, the same issues start recurring, the proactive work gets thinner, and six months later you realize you have been tolerating something you would not have accepted on day one. By then most people have mentally left already and are just waiting for a convenient moment.

We would much rather have the uncomfortable conversation at month two.

What to do first. Call Jeremiah directly. Not a ticket, not the technician you like, not an email to support. The owner. There is a separate article on this in the Support topic and the short version is that it will not be awkward afterward and it will not land on the technician as a complaint about them personally.

Be specific rather than general. "Service has gone downhill" is hard to act on. "Three tickets last month took more than a day to get a first response, and the printer issue has come back four times" is something we can go and look at, and there will be a reason. Sometimes the reason is ours and we fix it. Sometimes it is that your environment changed and the agreement did not keep up. Occasionally it is a genuine mismatch, in which case we will tell you so rather than string it along.

What you should expect back. A specific answer with a date, not reassurance. What went wrong, what changes, by when, and how you will be able to tell. If what you get is an apology and a promise to do better, that is not an answer and you should say so.

Things worth checking yourself, because they tell you whether it is drift or decay:

• Is the invisible work still happening? Ask for patch compliance, the date of the last tested restore, and when access was last reviewed. Those slip before response times do.
• Is anyone raising anything you did not ask about? A provider that has stopped bringing you things has stopped looking.
• Is your ticket count going up? Over a year it should be going down.

And if it does not get fixed. Every agreement is month to month with 30 days notice, no term and no early termination fee. You get your documentation, your credentials and administrative ownership of everything, handed over properly rather than extracted. We built it that way deliberately: if we are not earning it, you should be able to leave without a penalty, and we should have to keep earning it every month rather than relying on a contract to hold you.

We would rather lose a client cleanly than keep one who is unhappy and stuck. There is an article in the Trust topic about why clients leave us, and it is an honest one.