When it comes to getting the technology support you need to keep your business running, nothing beats a great help desk solution. Unfortunately, not all help desks have the same quality that you would expect from experts in the field. To help you make the best decisions about your business’ technology support needs, we have outlined four key traits that you should look for in any help desk employee/solution.
Your employees appreciate when you give them all the tools they need to complete their day-to-day tasks. If you take the time to provide them with everything they need to do their jobs, then they will, in turn, provide you with a higher rate of productivity and work quality. One way you can make this happen is by giving them access to the technical assistance they’ll need.
When your business has computer problems, productivity tends to decline. Unfortunately, IT, for all its benefits, has to be constantly maintained. One of the best ways to maintain your technology, or fix issues when they arise, is to lean on an IT help desk. Let’s take a look at the ways an IT help desk can benefit your business.
For the business that relies on their IT, malfunctioning systems can be costly, both in terms of maintenance and the loss of productivity from downtime. When your business chooses to outsource its IT support it gains access to several services designed to keep downtime to a minimum and keep your technology working for you. In part two of our five-part series on the benefits of managed services, we describe the value of our 24/7 help desk and other forms of IT support.
A world without any technical issues bogging down your organization is rather picturesque, wouldn’t you agree? The issue here is that it’s often not possible for businesses that struggle with payment to make ends meet--particularly in regard to technology maintenance. You can potentially prevent a mound of problems in the future by providing your team with the technology assistance needed to get them through their day-to-day duties.
All businesses need technology to function properly, at least to a certain extent. Depending on how heavily they rely on technology for operations, however, they will need varying degrees of support. Some businesses are fortunate enough to have an in-house IT department that can handle most any request, but others depend on employees being their own tech support option. Needless to say this isn’t the preferable scenario to be in.
Technology support is critical to the success of businesses, but investing in these solutions presents an entirely different problem--whether or not your business can afford an in-house support team. Depending on the budget, businesses often find themselves investing in IT support that’s both counter-productive and costly. We’re here to tell you that remote support and a help desk solution can mitigate costs and help you achieve a higher return on your investment.
When it comes to maintaining and managing technology properly, larger businesses traditionally have the advantage over small-and-medium-sized ones, as they have greater financial resources. In fact, many small businesses will postpone these activities to help preserve the flexibility in their budget. What these businesses need is a way to leverage the benefits of proactive IT maintenance without breaking the bank.
Small businesses face considerable difficulties when trying to maintain their IT. First of all, since they generally have fewer employees, the workload is heavier for each resource. This leads to IT management being postponed in favor of other, seemingly more important concerns. However, this strategy accomplishes little more than putting the company in a more precarious position. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that hiring the personnel that could help you better manage your IT is often prohibitively expensive.
If neither option is practical, business in this position should turn to option three: managed IT services.
Managed services are a much different approach than what many would perceive as the typical IT service process, referred to as break/fix. Let’s say one of your pieces of hardware isn’t operating correctly. Once you report the issue to your IT provider, they dispatch someone to your location to resolve the problem, and you’re left on the hook paying a bill for that one specific call. You lose the capital, but also the potential revenue from the downtime you have experienced. This reactive approach therefore is quite a bit costlier than the increasingly more popular managed service model, which takes a proactive stance against technology issues.
At PCSOFT, we follow this proactive approach, monitoring your solutions remotely so that we can prevent issues from influencing your business, especially before they turn into bigger problems. For instance, under our managed service agreement, we will keep an eye on your infrastructure for any warning of hardware failure so you have an opportunity to replace that hardware before it can have a negative impact on your business.
If this option sounds more expensive than the break/fix approach, consider this: if you combine the loss in revenue that downtime from the broken equipment lead to and the cost of replacing or repairing the broken technology, you are out a significant amount of usable capital.
Compare that to managed services where there’s a chance that your problem could be resolved remotely--leading to a smaller service fee when compared to the cost of hardware replacement--it makes a lot of sense to see what kind of value PCSOFT’s certified technicians can bring you.
Depending on what is included in your service level agreement, the expenses associated with managed services will essentially always be less than the costs that of break/fix. PCSOFT can help you to make these changes in your own company, making operations both more reliable and less expensive in the process. To learn more about what managed IT services can do for you, give us a call at 02 98730080.
Workstations that don’t work properly can get in the way of even the most diligent of workers. If the IT department is too busy to give them immediate assistance, where can your employees turn to? If your organization has a help desk solution, workers have a great way to get the assistance they need without having to wait.