How many ways can I contact my MSP when I need help?

Ask two questions together: what are all the ways to reach you, and which do you prefer? A mature provider has at least three channels: a ticket portal or support email that creates a tracked request, a phone line a person answers during business hours, and a defined after-hours path for emergencies. The stated preference will almost always be tickets for routine issues, and that preference is legitimate: tickets get triaged by severity, nothing dies in someone's voicemail, and you get a record of what was done and when.

The channel that matters most is the exception path. When the server is down or a ransomware note is on the screen, nobody wants to compose an email and wait. So ask directly: if the business is stopped, what number do I call, who answers it, and what happens at 9pm on a Saturday? Providers with real operations have a concrete answer: an emergency line, an on-call rotation, an escalation you can trigger yourself. 'Open a ticket and we will see it' is not an emergency plan.

Red flags are easy to spot once you look: email as the only channel, a phone number that always lands in voicemail, or staff who cannot describe their own escalation path. You can test all of this before signing anything: call the support line as a prospect late on a Friday afternoon. How the phone gets answered tells you more than the sales presentation did.