Tag Archives: managed services

10 IoT Implementation and Management Tips for Businesses – Part 1

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Business woman hand using smartphone with IoT implementaion via multi-channel communication network on mobile application

Implementing IoT in the Office does it have a place in the office?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a trendy term for an incredibly useful new type of device: Smart devices. Devices that respond to Wi-Fi commands through web portals and mobile device. And they have an undeniable place in the modern office. The uses for IoT range from turning off an entire floor of lights with a word to remotely managing building security. With specialized business IoT devices, your office can likely do even more than the basic applications that have been imagined. Particularly if IoT is combined with “Smart Home” voice hub technology.

This article will outline the top tips for implementing and managing a network of IoT devices in your business.

 

Implementing IoT in the Office

Bringing IoT into the office starts with your choice of IoT technology.

1. Choose Your Hub

The first step is to choose the smart hub you want to use. While you can manage your IoT devices through individual portals and apps, the most complete and useful experience comes from something only offered by a hub that can use ‘skills’ to manipulate all of your IoT devices on command without worrying about which brand made them or which app controls them.

Alexa is winning the race for Smart Home hubs, and more devices respond to Alexa than other hubs. However, Microsoft is quickly dominating the market for a business IoT hub through Azure. The important thing is that you choose a hub that works with the devices you want to use and interacts in a way that works for your business.

Whatever hub you choose, you’ll need to place a hub speaker anywhere you want commands to be heard.

2. Start with Smart Lights

If your business is new to IoT, the best place to start is smart lights. It is cool to turn one light on and off with a voice command, without walking to the switch. It’s an efficiency miracle to turn on or off an entire floor of lights without running from switch to switch. Smart lights can improve your energy efficiency and save loads of time for anyone who opens or closes each day. Not to mention the ability to control brightness and the occasional use of party colors.

3. Create Helpful Routines Anyone Can Use

An IoT routine is a group of device commands enacted by a single trigger. For example, you can set every single light on a routine and turn them off by saying “Turn Off All Lights” or you can separate the routines floor by floor with commands like “Turn On Finance Lights”. Of course, routines can do much more than that. You could, for example, set up a routine called “Good Morning Office” that turns on the lights, starts the smart coffee pot brewing, warms up the printer, and unlocks the smart lock on the front door as well.

Be sure to create a few routines that everyone in the office can use on command, like lights or coffee pot controls, to make your office more responsive and intuitive overall.

4. Specialty Routines for Business Purposes

You will also likely want a few specialty routines known only to the teams meant to use them. IoT security, for example, does not need publicly available routines but the security team may be able to do some interesting and useful tasks with voice-command cameras and other IoT Security devices.

Of course, installing IoT in your office is only the first half of the process. As any IT security professional can tell you, the cost for all that accessibility is an increased cybersecurity risk. Fortunately, IoT can easily be secured by following the right separation and recovery steps which we’ll be covering in the second half of this article. Join us next time for part two where we’ll talk about how to ensure your new IoT gadgets are not a security risk for your internal business network. Contact us today to find out more about adding IoT functionality to your business!

5 Tips to Increase Your IT Help Desk Inquiry Efficiency

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IT Help Desk Inquiry Efficiency Concept

How efficient is your internal help desk?

The usefulness of your IT help desk isn’t just in the software you use or the skilled technicians solving problems. It’s also in how your employees approach their problems that need solutions. If you really want to increase both the efficiency and effectiveness of your IT help desk, part of that formula is helping your staff ask questions efficiently and learn to solve more common or basic problems on their own.

Here are five highly effective ways to increase the inquiry efficiency of your IT help desk.

1) Include Live Chat and Ticketed Inquiries

Traditional help desks function with ticketed inquiries. Employees send an email or use a form to submit an asynchronous request for assistance with any information they have. This works well for off-hours or long-solve solutions, but it can actually slow down the solve on quick or surface-level problems. Live chat has been found to be more effective at high-speed and interactive IT support than email or phone because it allows both parties to ask and answer questions quickly, share files, and run troubleshooting tests in real time.

2) Build a Detailed Tech FAQ – Keep it Updated

Interestingly, you can also increase help desk efficiency by eliminating a percentage of inquiries made. The answer is simple: A really helpful and well-build FAQ. FAQs have evolved well beyond a list of question-and-answers into ‘help portals’ that assist the user in finding the answers to common and easy to solve problems.

For example, you probably don’t need as many IT help desk calls about troubleshooting printers or employee emails as your help desk handles. A good FAQ as your first line of defense can help employees quickly solve any problem that is already known and has only a few simple steps to try.

3) Equip Chatbots to Answer FAQ Questions

Of course, not everyone is apt at searching a FAQ or help portal for the answers they need. Others don’t have time to explore the interface. For your rushed employees, the key to streamlining quick IT services and access to the FAQ is a simple chatbots. Programmable chatbots can be ‘loaded up’ with answers to common questions. And a common question is a FAQ by any other name.

What this means is that not only can you provide a FAQ answer portal, you can also equip a chatbot assistant to listen for ‘FAQ’-like questions and give the standard answer. This will speed up early troubleshooting immensely. A Chatbot can also direct employees to a real live IT help desk member for questions that go beyond the scope of the FAQ.

4) Provide Micro-Learning on Common IT Solutions

You can even teach your employees to handle increasingly complex-yet-common fixes through the use of micro-learning modules. These ‘just-in-time’ lessons can walk employees through how to do complex fixes that your company may deal with on a regular basis. The best part about micro-learning lessons is that you can ask your IT help desk team to create or map them based on the questions they really do get and solve the most often. From there, employees can summon the lesson and walk themselves through common solves without having to call IT again.

5) Have Employees Mark Category and Urgency

Finally, for problems that can’t be handled through FAQ best-practices or a quick live chat, you want a superb ticket sorting procedure. Your IT help desk can do their job best when they know what each ticket is about, how much time it will take, and how urgent the solution is before they start. Which means your team needs to know how to convey this information when they submit a problem.

When possible, ask employees to mark the category, severity, and urgency of every support ticket they request from your IT help desk. The more detail you encourage to be shared, the better. This gives your IT team a clear place to start when they pick up the ticket, live or asynchronously.

Providing an IT help desk to your employees is an important step in streamlining any modern business. But the help desk doesn’t have to be on your permanent staff. Take advantage of internal streamlining techniques and the logistic advantage of outsourced IT professionals. For more information about how to make your IT help desk more efficient, contact us today.

Why Have an Employee-Facing IT Help Desk?

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Smiling customer support operator agent with hands-free device workingan employee-facing IT help desk

Staffing a internal Help Desk is difficult, why not outsource?

Traditionally, help desks are considered to be customer-facing services. Customer service help desks, exchange and return help desks, concierge service desks. But when it comes to IT, there’s a long tradition of internal employee-facing services instead. Even companies that don’t offer tech products to customers use plenty of technology on the inside. An internal IT help desk is the key to ensuring that each and every team member can handle their own workstations, devices, and work software on the fly — without interrupting the normal workflow of your business.

Employee-facing IT helpdesks have been a hallmark of the business world since the days of separate college internetworks and internal company email. IT help desks are older than the world wide web and have been necessary for as long as employees have been using computer workstations. And today, we’re here to highlight how an IT help desk can streamline any business, even those that don’t spend all day every day on the computer.

No Need for a Computer Whiz On-Site

Many businesses that do not focus primarily on technology (but still use it daily) rely on one or two IT talented staff on site. Your computer whiz is the person with enough IT background or DIY skills that they can solve most problems just by poking around the controls for a while. But not every team has one, and those that do often demand too much IT from someone who’s job is not defined as IT support.

Working with an IT help desk designed for employee-facing service is the key to no longer needing someone on your work team to have the incidental skills. Outsourcing your IT help desk can even mean saving money, as internal IT staff are highly priced in the current job market.

Supervisors Not Expected to Provide IT Fixes

When an employee’s computer, network connection, or work software stops working, the first person they usually call is their supervisor. Unfortunately, supervisors in non-tech industries are seldom equipped to solve more than simple and common technical hiccups. Not to mention, calling one’s boss for every email malfunction or connection problem is bad for business efficiency.

With an internal IT desk, your team members can call IT instead of their boss. The IT technician on the other end can quickly walk any employee through their technical problems or even take control of the computer remotely. They will fix things up quick and get the work back on track without any further interruptions to the workflow.

Staff Can Seek Solutions to Job-Unique Problems

Then there are problems that supervisors or the on-site computer whiz can’t solve because they are not common or easy. Issues that only come up in certain positions using unique devices, software, or tasks that no other role does. In these cases, technical problems can stop work all day as an employee tries to troubleshoot their unique problems or find someone who can.

However, your unique role employees are not alone with the help of an internal IT service. Technicians who specialize in business software are also great at figuring out solutions to not-so-common problems. This can get your team back on-task without losing hours to unusual technical challenges.

Network & Infrastructure Issues Solved Quickly

Finally, an internal IT help desk is key to keeping your entire office or non-office business online. Network and tech infrastructure are what all other computer-based processes are built on. Without your internal network and the workstations it connects, nothing would get done. Which is why infrastructure errors or network interruptions are so important to fix quickly.

An IT help desk can make sure your network is online from working with the local router to contacting your ISP (internet service provider) if necessary. They can also ensure that your infrastructure is up-to-date, defended, and repaired quickly should anything go wrong. This way, your computers stay online and your doors remain open no matter what happens.

Having an internal IT service for your company isn’t just something big corporations do. With MSP (managed service provider) outsourcing, you can have all the benefits of an internal IT help desk without the extensive cost of building a team of full-time technicians on staff. For more information about how an MSP can help you build the IT help desk services your company deserves, contact us today!

5 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Managed IT Service, Not IT Repair Service

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Executive Optimizing Well Performance Via Apps - Managed IT Service

Is it time to partner with a managed service provider and get out of the break fix environment?

Small businesses need all of the core infrastructure that larger businesses do. Your business needs a marketing team, salespeople, financial and legal analysts, and a help desk. But depending on how small your business is, all of those departments might be yours. Take one of those loads off your shoulders with a proactively managed IT service. Here’s why the plan is basically built for small businesses, especially compared to traditional IT help.

1. Your business is in the field, not in the office.

If your business offers a service that isn’t on-premises like a restaurant, then you and your coworkers will be spending a lot of time traveling. Instead of the traditional office setup of a desktop computer, printer, and modem, you might have a tablet and a VPN. That mobility means you can’t afford to be locked in one place as someone shows up to investigate the issue and make repairs.

Managed service providers, or MSPs, provide remote monitoring and preventative services instead. They monitor (without being invasive) potential network outages, malware and cyber threats, and signs of developing problems in your computers systems. When you’re operating off the cloud and through dozens of different apps and websites, that’s the service you need.

2. Every business is global, even when it’s local.

One of the best things about the Internet is that it opened up the international playing field for small businesses. Even if you run a business by yourself, you can do business everywhere from the United States to New Zealand. Your customers can be anywhere without the fees associated with international shipping and communication from even just a decade ago.

But that also means your business is open 24/7. A midnight website crash isn’t just a small problem anymore: it means your website was offline during some of your customers’ most active hours. A traditional IT repair service won’t send someone out until the next morning. They might even wait until the next business day. But a 24/7 software-based service is on top of the problem immediately.

3. Cyber threats consider small businesses to be low-hanging fruit.

Hackers usually aren’t aiming at a specific target. Instead, they’re looking for easy targets that get snagged in their nets and which require the least effort to break into. Small businesses, unfortunately, are prime targets because you have a lot of useful information but not a lot of resources to chase them down with. So make sure your company’s cybersecurity is too strong to make your company a tempting target.

4. Stay light with software protections instead of hardware fixes.

When you own a small business, you probably don’t want all of the heavy hardware investments that larger companies invest in. You don’t need an arsenal of backup computers, and you don’t need a dedicated floor full of internal servers. As more and more tools become virtual, that means your need for a physical IT service diminishes, too. Look for online solutions such as antimalware programs, cloud subscriptions, and VPNs instead of traditional measures.

5. Pay according to your company’s size, not according to man hours.

When you schedule a window for a traditional technician to come to troubleshoot a problem, you’re going to pay a transportation fee and by the hour. It’s going to be the same rate that every other company is paying; it might even be lower because larger companies can negotiate prices. But with an MSP, you pay based on the size of the network you want protected, and that means your monthly expenses are easier to manage.

Go to SystemsNet to learn more about managed IT services and why it’s the best move your company can make to protect itself.