Rex Marchant

A technical account manager is the designated person at an IT provider who looks past the help desk and gives a client strategic guidance. At Helion that’s the Client Technology Manager, or CTM: your escalation contact when a ticket needs attention, and the person who brings proactive recommendations on infrastructure and roadmaps, plus updates on … Read more

A good IT support ticket tells the technician who you are, which store and system, what you were doing, the exact error, when it started, who else is affected, and whether a customer is waiting. With those in the first message, work starts on the fix. “Printer’s down.” That’s the whole ticket. Nobody who sends … Read more

Multi-site IT support for a dealer group means every rooftop calls one help desk, and each ticket carries the store, the system and the person, so one team can fix, dispatch and report across the whole group. It works when the stores run on one standard build, field technicians are sent by location, and leadership … Read more

A maintenance window is a planned block of time for installing updates, patches, firmware and network changes. At a dealership that’s open every day, pick it around each department’s real hours, test first, tell the store ahead and keep a way back. Microsoft puts out its security updates on the second Tuesday of every month, … Read more

IT support tiers are the levels a help desk ticket moves through. Tier 1 answers the call and fixes common problems, Tier 2 and Tier 3 take the harder ones, and outages go straight to engineers or a field technician. Nobody at a dealership calls the help desk and asks for Tier 2. They call … Read more

A PC refresh cycle replaces dealership computers by age and warranty, not when they break. Build the asset list, rank which PCs go first, and budget each year.

IT documentation for dealerships: what to capture (admin accounts, circuits, vendors, DMS and phone settings) and why it belongs in systems, not a binder.

Help desk identity verification means confirming that a caller is who they say they are before the help desk resets a password, grants access, or changes anything for them. At Helion, every person who calls our help desk for support is verified first. Several years ago, one of our client dealerships had a vendor helping … Read more

Bad IT support at a dealership usually looks busy, not absent: tickets close quickly, but the same problems come back, nobody owns the whole system, and nobody can show you what was fixed or why. Pull up the last few closed tickets from your store and read the closing notes. Not the subject lines. The … Read more