All posts by SystemsNet Administrator

What Your Customers Get From an IT Help Desk

Manage Service, , , , , ,
Smiling business woman working an IT help desk

No one likes using chat wizards when they have a problem, it’s frustrating

Providing great software is no longer enough to stay competitive in the modern online business culture. Between mobile apps and the full-funnel experience, any kind of technical problem can cause you to lose leads and frustrate customers who might otherwise glide smoothly through purchase after purchase. Incorporating an IT help desk is a great strategic decision for a growing company for the simple benefit of helping your customers use the website and mobile app as intended.

While this may sound small, to customers it can matter a great deal. Let’s take a closer look at the top four things that an IT Help Desk can bring to your customer experience.

A Human Answer to Frustrating Problems

When a website or mobile app doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, customers get frustrated quickly. It only takes one or two extra clicks, waiting for the site to respond or load, before the situation feels completely ridiculous. For most customers, the first place they go is the help center, or even the chatbot in the corner. With an IT Help Desk on the job, a real human will be ready and waiting to take their question.

Talking to a real person immediately relieves some of the tension, especially when followed up with compassionate help. Whether it’s a login issue or a payment card error, a real human on the other end of the chatbox means a lot to customers when they need assistance.

Assistance Completing Purchases

Purchase completion is one of the most frequent sources of customer technical issues. This is because so many different exchanges are required to complete a purchase. They may not be able to save their address, their card may not be accepted even though it works for them everywhere else. Frustration during the checkout phase leads to cart abandonment unless customers have somewhere fast and helpful to turn to.

An IT help desk integrated into your website is the best possible way to save sales that are stopped by technical difficulties. In fact, you can even create triggers to alert a help desk team member if someone has reloaded or attempted to edit a payment page several times in a row. Offering and providing help in this critical moment can significantly reduce your instances of abandoned carts and lost customers.

Mobile App Support

If your business has a customer mobile app, an IT Help Desk team is even more important. Many modern consumers do everything through their phones and prefer to interact with apps over websites in most cases. These users are also familiar with the ability to quickly chat with or call a help desk and will assume this is an option for your app even if you don’t yet have help desk support.

A help desk can make sure that users of your mobile app are always able to use the features they love and troubleshoot problems in real time. You can even find and fix any bugs in your mobile app quickly because users have a friendly place to send reports. Which takes us to the final point:

Having Problems Solved Immediately

Bugs in websites and mobile apps can’t always be fixed immediately, but an IT Help Desk is the key to helping customers outside the bounds of the software. Solutions can be manually implemented for customers, and then long-term fixes can be worked into future updates of the software. An IT Help Desk is essential for making sure customers get the service they need, even in cases where that doesn’t work exactly right with the website or mobile app.

So what can an IT Help Desk do for your customers? They can provide real-time solutions, human assistance in frustrating problems, save purchases from technical difficulties, and provide support to mobile users. This is something any growing brand needs to consider providing in order to remain competitive and keep customers happy. For more on how to implement a great IT Help Desk for your customers, contact us today!

5 Ways Preparing for a System Failure Should Be Part of Day-to-Day Operations

Data Backup, , , , , ,
Preparing for a System Failure as a Part of Day-to-Day Operations

Being prepared for a disaster should be  standard operating procedure

System failures can take everything. But if you plan ahead, you’ll have the infrastructure to set everything back in place. Instead of just relying on a disaster recovery plan and intermittent maintenance, build these five practices into your business’s usual operations.

1. Back up your actively changing data multiple times throughout the day.

System failures strike at the worst possible time. That includes in the middle of the day and right after your peak selling hour. If your systems don’t back up data frequently throughout the day, you may lose completed orders and sales without any way to notice the loss. This includes both online sales with customers anticipating deliveries or service and in-store transactions that won’t be totaled up into your third-party service until the end of the day.

Automate restore points that capture the frequently used programs or the systems that handle day-to-day operations. You’ll capture the vast majority of what you need without filling up your cloud in a week.

2. Save deeper system restore points regularly and don’t delete them.

But just capturing the active data entries every hour or every quarter of an hour isn’t everything you need to keep your business safe. Also schedule deeper data recovery downloads that capture everything. These larger restore points can be scheduled less frequently depending on the size or urgency of your business. Also be sure to set the schedule for low-activity points so your network isn’t overloaded.

These deeper packets of data are important because a system failure can wipe out everything. Having the day’s input won’t matter if the entire database is gone. So use these as insurance against complete wipeouts and then filter the transactional changes back in.

Deeper restore points also protect your company from slow-growing threats. Some network errors don’t immediately cause problems. Instead, they corrupt critical data or code behind the scenes. Save these points for as long as possible so you can reach weeks or months back to salvage uncorrupted data.

3. Run disaster recovery drills so everyone knows what to do.

Once you have your data saved and your system restores automated, the biggest problem in the event of a system failure is people. Train your employees so they know what to do once everyone goes down. Also, make sure you have hard copies of your data recovery and business continuity plans so people can find the procedure.

But there’s going to be panic if your company hasn’t gone through this before or if it’s been a long time. So hold drills every so often, and train new employees on what to do

4. Make your monitoring system notice the signs of an incoming system failure.

Usually, a system failure seems to strike out of nowhere. But they have lots of invisible warning signs that your employees just didn’t see. Network outages, old hardware, and more are all signifiers that increase your risk. A buildup of corrupted data or an increasingly unsteady code is noticeable as long as you know where to look.

So strengthen your system by adding monitoring software that can identify potential warning signs. Set threshold points where your IT staff or service knows to deal with the problem while it can still be prevented. Problem prevention can seem less urgent than dealing with customer tickets or a task requested by the executive team, but it can only be ignored for so long.

5. Train everyone to save in the cloud and not on the hardware.

Virtual computer systems have made system failures both better and worse. One of the best benefits of switching to the cloud and virtual machines is that a physically damaged server won’t ruin your business. But that’s only true if the employees actually make use of the virtual tools. Strap the company computers and devices to reduce local storage. If you have to leave local storage in place and your company has a server in the storage room as part of your legal requirements, automate that backup. Also, make sure employees are clear on where to save their documents and projects.

Go to SystemsNet here for more backup procedures and the tools you need to optimize your disaster recovery plan.

Advantages of managed IT Services

Manage Service, , , , ,
Enterprise Client Activating Managed IT Services

Are you ready to partner with a IT Support Company?

Focusing on monetary profit in any business should be the priority of its owner or manager not becoming an IT expert. The more time dedicated to planning and carrying out new profitable strategies, the more monetary profit taken in. It’s not ideal for any business owner or manager to deal with computing problems on their own because, due to time loss, there will be less profit. Even if a business owner could miraculously learn all the technical and security caveats associated with their custom setup, it would take hours to manage and repair broken devices as needed. The following points highlight the advantages of outsourcing the management of computer maintenance and repair.

  • Cost Savings
  • Time Savings
  • Improved Security

Cost savings can show itself in various ways not merely by discounts that can be obtained by using managed IT service providers. For example, more harm than good could be done when attempting to apply repairs without a strong knowledge of the type of repair being done and the possible consequences. Generally, attempting to apply repairs or maintenance without a thorough understanding of what’s being done could result in damage which costs more than to have a professional repair it or better yet, to have a professional handle maintenance and repair before getting to that point. It’s not unheard of for business owners to find ways to manage their own technology with the end result of a disaster or very close to it. In general, it’s not recommended to self-manage an IT infrastructure without a thorough knowledge of the task at hand and possible consequences.

In any business, the saying, “time is money” applies. It means that any time spent working toward the goal of bringing in monetary profit is time well-spent but any time spent away from those same efforts is time lost and therefore, money lost. Everybody needs time away from doing business as a way of maintaining our well-being, but as it pertains to spending time on tasks that will not bring in monetary profit, that is generally considered time lost. Allocating maintenance and repair time to a service provider allows business owners and managers to do what’s most important focus on the income of monetary profit and personal well-being.

Performing IT-related jobs without sufficient qualification is not only a risk of wasted time and money, but it opens doors for compromising data security. Imagine this we think we’ve got a sound plan to backup and restore computer data on our own in case of a deletion, regardless of the cause. The day comes when the data archives are needed and they turn out to be unusable they don’t work or they are corrupted What a nightmare that situation would be! Although there are some chances that the archives might work if put into the hands of experienced professionals, it would cost more money to attempt to restore the data than it would be to have just outsourced the data backup, to begin with. Furthermore, data security extends into the realm of keeping computer criminals away and from hacking into computers there is more to computer security than just making sure data is efficiently backed up. Learning computer security takes years and there are some aspects of it that are continuously changing. In a sense, keeping up with computer security in some instances is like trying to hit a moving target while blindfolded attempting to protect computers from hackers in without the consultation of experienced professionals is a bad idea.

SystemsNet provides a wide array of services that remove the IT management burden from businesses. Please contact us for a consultation.

How Alexa Integrations Can Improve YourAct! CRM’s User Experience

Contact Relationship Management, ,
Alexa - Smart speaker concept. AI speaker. Voice recognition.

Would AI help you in your daily tasks?

CRMs don’t just organize customer trajectories or automate workflows. Your company’s CRM is also a resource of information that everyone in your company needs to do their jobs. Whether a salesperson needs to know a customer’s preferred name, a financial manager needs to know the threshold for approving a certain discount, or your contracts team needs to know when a customer’s renewal date is, that information needs to be easy to access.

The problem is that the database might be hard to comb through. Alexa can help when you have an Act! CRM. Here’s how.

Multitask without flipping through tabs.

When you’re in the middle of a critical email or a ticket, the last thing you want to do is interrupt what you’re doing to go search for details across multiple open tabs. Instead of stopping to search for a customer name or an internal phone number, ask Alexa and keep going with your train of thought. Act! CRM is now enabled with Ask Act! functionality so Alexa can deliver the exact answer you’re looking for.

Task switching is one of the leading time wasters in corporate settings. Even switching to your CRM and back can interrupt your productivity. So ask Alexa to get the details you need instead of pausing in the middle of a sentence.

Invite Alexa to your next meeting.

Even with video conferencing, display screens, and all of the technology companies have to make meetings easier, they can still be technologically tedious. If you’ve finally gotten your screen sharing with everyone else, it can be a headache to search for answers on recent developments without getting the whole meeting off-track.

So make sure Alexa is set up to answer questions during your next quarterly sales report or team meeting. Alexa can search across the whole Act! database to find the data you need. You can also ask her to check for recent developments that changed between when you made your reports and the actual meeting.

Make sure your CRM is accessible to all of your employees who need the information.

There’s a lot of emphasis on making buildings accessible to employees. Many ADA regulations apply to physical space, such as wide walkways, ramps, and clear signage. There are fewer regulations in place to make sure web-related resources are accessible to everyone, and job-related tools are even less regulated. But it’s important to make sure all of your employees are equipped to do their jobs.

Ask Act! lets all of your employees access customer information through another medium. Whether your employees can use the extra functionality to keep their focus clear, use the tool to minimize hand-based information-gathering, or get accurate information sightlessly, it improves their workflow. It also makes your company a better place to work.

Mobile agents and field reps can get more done out of the office.

Use voice-controlled AI doesn’t just make life easier in the office. It also gives your field sales representatives and service technicians more options to get work done throughout the day. They can confirm customer details as they walk into a meeting without having to search for them. Depending on your state’s driving laws, they can even pull up critical details while keeping their eyes on the road.

Even better, Act!’s newest versions have a mobile app powered with the same functionality as the desktop version. So your field reps can ask for information with their voice and then go into the app to make updates after each appointment or meeting.

Voice-controlled AI and tools are becoming more and more common. Adding integration with Amazon Echoes into your company’s CRM-based workflows make information-gathering easier and more accurate. It also gives your employees more options so they can deliver the best results. Go to SystemsNet to learn more about the different features Act! CRM has so you can optimize customer relationships.