Every technical service says it is reachable 24/7. Reading a message and solving the problem are not the same thing; four numbers that belong in the contract.
Almost every business collecting technical-service quotes hears the same sentence: "You can reach us 24/7 on WhatsApp." The sentence is true; the phone really is on at night. The problem is a contractual gap between being reachable and solving the problem, and that gap is usually discovered on a Saturday night when the server stops.
Reachability is not a service
Your WhatsApp message being marked "seen" contains no commitment. The commitment is what happens after the message: within how many minutes a human replies, within how many hours they connect remotely, within how many hours they are on site, and what happens if the problem is not solved. Until these four questions are answered, "24/7" is only a marketing phrase.
Four numbers that belong in the contract
- Response time: the longest time after your report until a technician calls or writes back, for example 30 minutes in working hours and 2 hours outside them.
- Remote intervention time: the longest time until the technician connects remotely and starts working. Most faults are solved at this step.
- On-site intervention time: the longest time until the technician is at your door when remote work is not enough, written separately for in-town and out-of-town.
- Priority classes: "the server is down" and "the printer will not print" should not wait in the same queue. Critical, high and normal classes with their own times belong in a table.
Is out-of-hours really covered?
The real cost of 24/7 is an on-call rota. A one- or two-person team cannot sustain it; if it claims to, out-of-hours response means "first thing in the morning". An honest contract states which systems are covered outside working hours (server, firewall, camera recording), which are not (a single user's PC) and the surcharge for out-of-hours site visits.
Records and reports
Every report should become a job record: when it was reported, who took it, what was done, when it was closed. A summary of these records should reach you at month end. Without the report nobody can measure whether response times were kept, and an unmeasured commitment is no commitment.
Questions to ask
- Who reads messages outside working hours, and how many people are on the rota?
- Can you describe an incident you handled at night in the last three months?
- What happens under the contract if you miss the response time?
- Are passwords and configurations kept with us or with you?
When the answers are in writing, 24/7 stops being a promise and becomes a measurable service. In SMB Teknoloji's maintenance contracts these four numbers and the reporting duty are standard clauses; out-of-hours coverage is written per system.