Tag Archives: Outsource IT

What Your Customers Get From an IT Help Desk

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!

Advantages of managed IT Services

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.

5 Reasons Your Company Can Benefit from Managed IT and Network Monitoring Services (Part 1)

Saas company business man with a laptop. Managed IT and network monitoring services concept

Managed IT and Network Monitoring Services

In the business world, everything runs on the network. Information of every stripe is constantly being processed and transmitted through multiple company machines, over cloud hosting, and stored in proprietary servers either locally or again on the cloud. Business software suites rule the day, often adding more network calls as they self-maintain and contact central data stores to keep all employees on track and supplied with the information they need to function and this is all without considering if a company is also providing online services to their customer we as well. With this overwhelming use of networking between company computers, clients, and the cloud, it’s no wonder more and more businesses are turning to outsourced help to manage their IT infrastructure and monitor their network activity. If you haven’t hired a crack team of IT experts to keep a watchful eye on your business network, here are five great reasons to consider doing so.

1 Ensuring Steady Service to Your Customers

Monitoring services are there to tell you when things are about to go sideways with enough of a head-start to prevent the oncoming disaster. You may be one of the thousands of companies that provide online services to customers that should not be interrupted under any circumstances. Many Saas companies provide real-time data, dashboards, and support that must be available when customers need them and some companies even serve medical providers and patients as part of an active health plan. If a server dies or a network connection goes down at the wrong moment, customers will not only be unhappy, they could be terribly disadvantaged and even lose money from their own businesses or the ability to interact with vital services as a result of the interruption.

Making sure the vital connection between your company and clients stays online is one of the things that a managed IT and monitoring as a service can provide for. If something is about to go wrong, your outsourced technicians can send you a timely message and help to redistribute resources to keep your services available without having to stack additional tasks onto your in-house techs if you have any.

2 Preventing Overload During High Traffic Hours

Most websites and services see cyclical visitation from their customers as log-in patterns match the requirements and opportunities of daily life. Companies with incredibly popular websites have to be aware of this ebb and flow pattern in order to prepare for their most high-traffic weekly hours. When many people all log into your website at once, this can create an overwhelming flood of activity on your network and has been known to overpower the available bandwidth and server resources.

While the extra business is good, young companies who experience a sudden increase in popularity have faced complete website failure when traffic exceeded their network capabilities. Managed IT and network monitoring services can help you both prepare your network for dangerously high traffic and offload resources at exactly the right time during these rush periods to keep your website up, running smoothly, and providing sales to your eager customers.

Managed IT services offers you a stability, constant maintenance, and optimization that break-fix IT simply can’t compare to. Of course, this is only the first half of our two-part article on the benefits of working with a managed service provide. Instead of just waiting for your computer system to eventually fail and then calling an expert, with managed IT your servers and infrastructure will be actively maintained, updated, curated, and load-balanced at all times Join us next time for the second half of this article where we’ll talk about optimization, detecting errors before they happen, and repairing any unavoidable or externally caused errors immediately. For more information about managed IT services, contact us today!