There are about 3,000 managed service providers in the UK. Most of them will sell you the same deck. “24/7 support, proactive monitoring, cloud-first approach.” It is almost useless for choosing one.
Here are the questions that actually separate them.
1. “What is your first-touch resolution rate, and how do you measure it?”
If the answer is above 80 percent and the measurement is clear, you are probably talking to an engineering shop. If it is hand-waved, you are talking to a ticket-churn factory that passes tickets around to pad the numbers.
For context, we sit around 83 percent. The industry average is closer to 60 percent.
2. “Who picks up the phone at 3am?”
Follow-up: is it the same person who picks up at 3pm? A lot of “24/7” MSPs use offshore call centres after hours who can read a script but cannot actually fix anything. Ask to meet the on-call engineers.
3. “What is your patching SLA?”
Critical vulnerabilities should be patched within 72 hours. Not “we have a patching policy”. An actual SLA, with an actual consequence. If they cannot tell you, they do not have one.
4. “How do you handle shadow IT and unmanaged endpoints?”
The honest answer is that you will always have some. The question is whether they have a process for finding it and bringing it in. Discovery tooling, a quarterly audit, a policy for BYOD. If the answer is “we just manage what you tell us about”, run.
5. “Walk me through a recent incident.”
Good MSPs love telling this story. They will show you the runbook, the timeline, the post-incident review. Bad MSPs will give you a vague success story from 2022. Ask for specifics.
6. “How is cybersecurity handled, and is it separate?”
Some MSPs charge extra for “advanced security”. Fine, to a point. But if MFA, conditional access, endpoint EDR, and email security are extras, you are not buying managed IT, you are buying help desk. Basic security belongs in the base package.
7. “Can I see your contract?”
Not the glossy proposal. The actual contract. Check for auto-renewal clauses (industry standard is 60 to 90 days notice), exit costs (should be none), data return terms, and SLA credits (they should exist). If they will not send the contract until you sign, walk away.
8. “How many clients does your account manager handle?”
40 is a lot. 60 is too many. Beyond 60 and you are a line on a spreadsheet.
9. “What does your onboarding look like, week by week?”
A structured answer with named deliverables is good. “We will have you live in two weeks” is not an onboarding, it is a sales promise. Our onboardings take six to eight weeks and nobody has ever complained about the detail.
10. “What do you not do?”
Every good MSP has a list of things they do not do. It might be ERP, it might be bespoke dev, it might be mainframe support. If they claim to do everything, they are cheating you somewhere.
The honest tell
Good MSPs talk about boring things. Patching, documentation, process, runbooks, escalation paths. Bad MSPs talk about buzzwords and tools. Anyone selling AIOps without talking about patch SLAs first is selling you a dashboard, not an outcome.
If you are currently evaluating, we would love to be one of the three people you compare. Bring the hard questions. We will answer them.