A service review should help you decide what needs attention. Ticket volume and a green dashboard are inputs, not a complete account of whether the service is working.
Begin with the last action list
For each previous action, ask whether it was completed, what evidence supports closure, and whether the intended result occurred. Keep an owner and due date on every open item. If an action is blocked, identify the decision or dependency needed. Avoid allowing the same overdue items to disappear into a new slide deck every month.
Review support from the employee’s perspective
Look at aging cases, repeat issues, reopened tickets, and feedback alongside response targets. Ask whether a small group is experiencing repeated disruption that overall averages conceal. Choose one recurring issue and agree a corrective action. Distinguish requests waiting on a business decision from work the provider has not progressed.
Discuss exceptions and recovery evidence
Request a concise view of unmanaged devices, overdue changes, unresolved security exceptions, failed backups, and the latest relevant restore test. For each material gap, identify the business impact, interim action, owner, and next review. Keep detailed sensitive evidence in an appropriate restricted system; the meeting pack should contain only what participants need.
Reconcile the bill with service changes
Compare billed quantities with agreed changes in employees, licenses, sites, and projects. Review unplanned charges and the approval record. Ask which costs are expected next month and which annual commitments are approaching. A service review is an opportunity to prevent a surprise, not only explain one after the invoice arrives.
Make a small number of explicit decisions
Prioritize actions by business impact and dependency. For an illustrative review, leadership might approve replacing unsupported equipment, defer a cosmetic upgrade, and assign an application owner to resolve access exceptions. Record the rationale and any risk accepted. Keep operational fixes separate from larger roadmap decisions that need more analysis.
Close with a shared record
Circulate decisions, owners, dates, and evidence links through the agreed channel. Confirm the next checkpoint and the escalation route for items that cannot wait. At the following meeting, start with this record. Consistent follow-through is a better signal of account management than the number of pages in the report.
Published by Bay Area Managed IT. Examples are illustrative; they are not provider quotes, audited results, or local market survey findings. Read our editorial approach →
Bring these questions to your next provider conversation.
Use a common scope and keep the evidence beside each answer.
Prepare your RFP