IT Support · North West and UK-wide
IT Support & Managed Services
Smart Wave IT provides managed IT support for offices, professional practices, hospitality and retail operators and multi-site groups, with same-day response and a 4-hour on-site SLA in our core cities: Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Preston, Blackpool, Chester and Crewe. Multi-site estates are supported UK-wide from a single documented standard. The distinction that matters is that we are an installer that supports, not a helpdesk that subcontracts anything physical. When the fix is a failed switch, a cable re-terminated or an access point moved, that is our engineer on the same ticket. Contracts are priced per user or per site, whichever genuinely fits, with the documentation, the security baseline and the tested backups that clients, insurers and auditors now ask for included rather than sold as a project.
Why businesses pick us
Track record behind every IT support & managed services job.
- 700+
- UK installs
- 80+
- Europe rollouts
- 4 hrs
- on-site SLA
- < 1 hr
- typical remote fix
we support what we install
one standard, many sites
an engineer, not an auto-reply
most tickets never need a visit
Who we provide IT support for
The trigger for changing IT provider is rarely one disaster. It is accumulation: nobody can say where the backups go, the person who set it up has left, a client has sent a security questionnaire, or a response time of two to three business days has been discovered to be useless when the tills are down at lunchtime.
The businesses we support most often:
- Professional services: solicitors, accountants, surveyors and financial firms with confidentiality, compliance and remote-working needs
- Hospitality and retail operators: tills, card terminals, kitchen screens and the network under them, supported by the team that fitted them
- Multi-site groups: consistent support across every branch, with one standard build and one view for head office
- Logistics, warehousing and manufacturing: warehouse management systems, scanners, label printers and the wireless they depend on, often across shifts
- Clinics, dental and veterinary practices, and independent schools: uptime for the booking and records systems the day runs on
- Growing firms with no IT person at all, where a director has been doing it in the evenings and would like to stop
What a Smart Wave IT support contract includes
Priced per user or per site depending on which fits your shape. We would rather scope it accurately than sell unlimited cover with an asterisk, and the things a client or insurer will ask for are in the contract, not in a separate quote.
- Same-day response with a 4-hour on-site SLA in our core cities; remote support for anything that does not need an engineer in the building
- Proactive monitoring of servers, switches, firewalls, wireless and connectivity, so we often know before you do
- Microsoft 365 administration, licensing review and a written security baseline: MFA everywhere, conditional access, sharing rules
- Patching for workstations, servers and the network kit most providers leave alone
- Backup monitoring with tested restores on a schedule you can quote, because an untested backup is a hope
- Documentation you own: asset register, network diagram, credentials handled properly, kept current
- A quarterly review with the numbers: tickets, response times, what keeps breaking and what we are going to change
How to choose IT support: break-fix, per-user managed or per-site managed
Most providers sell one model and make every business fit it. The right one depends on how many people you have, how much uptime is worth, and whether your kit is a dozen laptops or a building full of tills and cameras. This is the comparison we go through before quoting.
| Break-fix (pay per call-out) | Managed, per user per month | Managed, per site per month | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Very small firms with little to lose from a day's downtime | Offices and practices where each person has a device and a mailbox | Hospitality, retail and depots: few users, lots of kit, high cost of downtime |
| What you pay | Hourly or per visit, unpredictable | Typically £25 to £55 per user per month | Typically £150 to £400 per site per month |
| Response | When the provider is free | Contracted; ours is same-day, 4-hour on-site | Contracted; ours is same-day, 4-hour on-site |
| Monitoring and patching | None; you find the fault | Included | Included, with the tills, cameras and network in scope |
| Documentation and security evidence | Rarely | Included with us: diagram, asset list, baseline, backup evidence | Included with us |
| Our usual recommendation | Only as a stopgap | Most offices and professional firms | Most venues, shops and multi-site estates |
What IT support costs
Two models, two ranges, and a straight answer on which one fits before anything is signed.
- Per-user contracts: £25 to £55 per user per month, depending on cover level and whether servers and Microsoft 365 administration are in scope
- Per-site contracts: roughly £150 to £400 per site per month for venues and depots with few users and high uptime needs
- Extended-hours or 24-hour cover for shift operations: priced as a line item and stated plainly, never implied
- Onboarding: a discovery exercise that produces the documentation, the findings and a prioritised list before you commit further
- Project work (a new site, a migration, a fit-out) quoted separately at a fixed price, not absorbed into the monthly fee and billed by surprise
- No charge to answer a client's security questionnaire from the documentation we already hold
Support for more than one site, and for what we installed
Support works better when the same people built what is being supported. For estates that means the same standard build in every venue, so an engineer who has fixed one has fixed them all; that is how the 80-site European rollout is still supported today. When a Manchester firm's Wi-Fi dropped out of every video call, we found the underlying fault rather than resetting the router again; that one is in our Manchester corporate Wi-Fi case study. And when a Liverpool restaurant lost its tills mid-service, we were on site in half an hour and traced it to a failing switch, as told in our Liverpool restaurant case study.
Our office Wi-Fi kept dropping out during important video conferences. Smart Wave not only fixed the immediate issue but also identified and resolved the underlying problem. Highly recommend Danny and Louis.
IT support problems we get called in to fix
Almost every new contract starts with an inheritance. These are the situations we walk into most often, and the reason the first thing we do is document.
- "Response within four hours" that turned out to mean an acknowledgement email, with an engineer days away
- Backups that have run green for two years and have never once been restored
- A security questionnaire from a client or insurer that nobody can answer, with a renewal or a contract riding on it
- Guest Wi-Fi, tills and the office on one flat network, so a busy Saturday slows the card terminals
- The previous provider left no documentation, and three passwords are in one person's head
- A helpdesk that fixes software and subcontracts anything with a screwdriver, so the switch that failed on Friday is replaced the following Wednesday
Where we install
IT Support & Managed Services across the North West and beyond
Each city page covers the local detail: the buildings, the trade, the licensing and the response times for that area. Multi-site and national projects are quoted from Liverpool and delivered wherever the sites are.
- IT Support in Liverpool
- Manchester IT support
- IT Support for Leeds businesses
- IT Support in Preston
- Blackpool IT support
- IT Support for Chester businesses
- IT Support in Crewe
Other services
Common questions
Frequently asked.
Expect £25 to £55 per user per month for a per-user contract, depending on cover level and whether servers and Microsoft 365 administration are in scope. Sites with few users but high uptime needs, which is most hospitality and retail, are better served by a per-site contract at roughly £150 to £400 a month. We recommend the model that fits your shape rather than the one that bills more.
Ready when you are
Need IT support & managed services for one site or fifty?
Call us today. Straight answer, same-day visit where possible.