Our approach.
Interested in what Urban can do for you, but not ready for a conversation yet?
Urban Network have been working and helping Birmingham based businesses for over 15 years and have put together 8 questions that we get asked in every new conversation to help you get the answers before you speak to us.
Urban Network were born as a business-to-business IT provider in 2003, never diluting our service by delivering retail or residential services and focussing solely on the needs of the SME market. A managed service provider for over 20-years, our knowledge and expertise have helped Birmingham-based businesses succeed.
We believe that ultimately your IT systems exist to deliver a capability to your staff. It’s the staff, and what they can do using the systems that create value for your business. Our goal is to be the single point of contact for your people, engage with them and communicate regularly to help them understand and exploit the IT capabilities you give them. We leverage technology to your advantage, aligning your business goals with the most suitable IT solutions to achieve them. Whatever your challenge, you can move forward with confidence.
Urban have consistently been voted as one of the Top 50 IT Companies within the UK, our founders are incredibly active within the IT community working hard towards improving the standards across the IT industry and to ensure the service levels every client receives meets an appropriate minimum standard from accredited people. Urban understands what good looks like when providing such a valuable service to our clients and we strive to exceed this standard every day
Our aim is to act as an in-house IT support department as much as possible and to cover all areas of your environment. We provide one comprehensive core IT Support service that is best broken down into day-to-day support, proactive maintenance, operational and strategic management.
We will support your Birminham-based business with unlimited access to our engineering team from 8.00am to 6.00pm. Monday to Friday, ensuring we are there when you need us throughout your full working day. We also remove the administrative burden of new employee starters and leavers through a bespoke client portal tailored for your business. When your new starter joins your business, all they need to do is log on, everything will be ready for them. We can also provide full procurement for new hardware and software and manage the entire installation for you.
From a proactive perspective, we will keep all your devices we have under management up to date to ensure that your team are productive, and the device is secure. We even include a baseline anti-virus tool and additional web security agent provided by Cisco, one of the largest security firms in the world. Our remote management tools enable us to monitor all computers and servers and alert us ahead of time of any potential issues, allowing us to act before you become aware. You will receive regular weekly and monthly reporting on all device health and service desk activity to keep you informed on how your employees are engaging with us. Your named account manager will conduct proactive reviews with you of all service tickets every 30 or 60-days to help identify any trends or recurring issues and agree what actions can be taken to prevent them in the future. Everything is tracked to ensure that your business continually prospers through the use of technology.
Finally, we bring all of this together and perform the role of your IT Director and review all aspects of your IT environment with you every 90-days. We provide you access to our online system that collates all data points and signals from your business and distils this down to actionable insights about your technology. This report then forms your bespoke interactive roadmap for the future, tracking progress and agreeing next steps.
Although Urban are a 24/7 business and offer IT support coverage 24-hours a day, 7 days a week (Yes, even on Christmas Day!), it is not a service we offer as standard. The reality is that although most organisations feel that they need this level of cover, especially as we now operate in a hybrid world, it is rarely used, and so to keep our costs low we only offer this coverage as an optional feature.
New installations, PC Builds or projects are not included and will be scoped and priced separately to any day-to-day support that is needed. We do include setting up new starters within your business or removing leavers as standard though.
In the same vein, we don’t include site visits as standard within our service. We are more than happy to come to the site if needed but we just charge separately per hour for this. Once again, think about how often an engineer actually needs to come to the office—it is very rare, our own stats show we resolve over 95% of all requests remotely. The need for this has massively reduced, so why pay for a service you’re not going to use? We can add it on if you really want it, but let’s really review how likely it is first.
We have been a Microsoft partner over 20-years and so we can provide Microsoft 365 licenses to you, and many other services such as Internet, VoIP phones, managed printing and many cyber security services as additional and chargeable services.
The thinking that you should have a single provider to manage all of your IT requirements is a sound one, which is why Urban Network supply and manage a host of other services, including Internet connectivity, VoIP phones, managed printing, application development, data backup & disaster recovery and many cyber security services. We only partner with market-leading vendors and then offer these services, fully managed at very competitive pricing.
Urban Network are Cyber Essentials accredited and have been a certification body for the UK Government’s body, IASME since its inception in 2014. We are authorised, accredited and knowledgeable on what SME’s need to protect themselves from today’s cyber risk.
Urban have been operating within the Birmingham area since 2009, albeit under a different trading name. We are currently based within the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham’s city centre within the Big Peg building, where our engineers are based. We support all the surrounding areas including Coventry, Tamworth, Walsall, Wolverhampton, Cannock and Stafford.
We charge primarily on a per-user, per month basis, which can change monthly depending on your employee count. This means that it is very easy for you to understand our costs and for you to budget for your costs per employee. By fixing the rate you pay us per month we are completely aligned with your goals, we are financially incentivised to stabilise and improve your technology experience!
Our charges per user, per month range from £35 to £49. The price can be impacted by the complexity of your IT environment, the health or age of the devices being managed and your current cyber security profile. By implementing a strong cyber security posture and modern equipment within your business results in a lower risk for you and potentially less work for us so your support fees may be lower!
Moving from one provider to another is something many people get worried about, but it is honestly a very simple thing that doesn’t cause downtime or disruption. Clients coming and going is a normal situation, so it’s a standard operating procedure for all mature and professional IT providers.
Once you have given notice, we will introduce you to your dedicated onboarding engineer, who will explain the full process to you. They report weekly on the progress of the project, keeping you updated and organising quick catch-up calls. We ask the losing provider for as little as possible to make it easy for them, and then we do our own audit and documentation of all your systems. This is usually done over a minimum of 30 days, and we suggest a small overlap with the old provider. We manage the whole thing; you don’t need to be involved besides a discussion mainly spent agreeing on processes such as the new starter and leaver process, the new device build, who the point of contacts would be and any VIP’s we need to be aware of.
One day your employees will be supported by one company, and the other by the next. The only difference will be better service the next day.
At the forefront of everything we do at Urban is centred around the human, if we are able to make people happy, the world is a better place to be! It may be a simple case of our team resolving an issue for you via the service desk, but it can also be defined as helping individuals within our company to excel at what they love and achieving their own ambitions. By fostering a supportive and collaborative environment within Urban, we know that this attitude echoes out to the service we provide our clients.
Our values reflect our belief that everything we do, will benefit our clients and subsequently us in kind:
Do the right thing; even when no one is looking
Be ambitious; always learning, always improving
Never assume; test, confirm & demonstrate
One team; different voice same result
WOW everyone; create amazing experiences, exceed expectations
Celebrate success; always celebrate the wins, learn from everything else
