IT disaster is always likely to strike, and if it does, it can have a large impact on the progress of your business and its overall financial state. These disruptions can also cause your customers to be left confused and frustrated if they are not properly addressed. However, if your IT provider takes a proactive approach, you are much less likely to experience long-term negative effects should problems arise.
What it Means to be Proactive
Proactive service is about anticipating your customers’ needs and solving problems before they happen. It’s common for many businesses to do this via their website; customers often have access to features like instructional videos and FAQs that answer their questions about a product before they end up having to call a customer service representative.
Proactive vs. Reactive
Proactive service deals with the identification and resolution of any issues customers may face before they turn into actual problems. At Excedeo, this approach informs everything we do.
Reactive support is when you react to the problem after it’s already happened. An example of this is if your company’s server crashed and you called your IT partner to come fix it. A proactive approach addresses the issue before it happens by understanding the server’s capabilities and weaknesses and optimizing its performance, reducing the risks of the server crashing.
Most IT partners implement reactive practices, but in order to be successful in terms of gaining customer satisfaction, it is wise to take on a proactive approach.
Benefits of Being Proactive
Benefits of being proactive include:
- Budgeting: Proactive service allows you to plan and budget your IT expenditure more strategically, which can be less expensive in the long-run.
- System Efficiency: Proactive service provides your business with constant monitoring and keeps your systems up to date, free of viruses and hackers and running smoothly.
- Productivity: A proactive approach will provide your business with tools needed for monitoring problems and resolving them before they escalate, thus significantly reducing the risk of downtime and creating a more efficient and happy work environment.
- Decision Making: Being proactive will allow you to make decisions that are better informed based on data that your managed service partner has gained through automated tools. This also allows you to plan your technology strategy to stay ahead of any issues.
- Disaster recovery: Partnering with an IT Partner that takes a proactive approach can help protect your business from disaster occurring as you will be one step ahead.
The best way to avoid possible IT issues is to ensure that you are proactively monitoring your IT hardware. Staying ahead of potential problems, and correcting issues before they ultimately result in outages, is the key to maintaining availability and performance.
Ensuring your IT Partner is Being Proactive
When running a business, you want to avoid constant system failures as minor issues can lead to bigger issues and cause customers and staff to become irritated. While making sure you are prepared with a backup plan in case issues do arise is definitely important, addressing issues before they arise can greatly reduce the likelihood of any possible problems. The key to making sure that system failure does not become a regular occurrence for your business is to maintain proactive support.
It is important to work with an IT partner that can ensure a proactive approach. Modern analytics and system management give businesses the option of receiving excellent support and offer the ability to locate and solve small problems before they lead to larger ones and serious damage. A good quality IT partner will be able to monitor and maintain connectivity devices, ensure reliability and fast internet connection, help secure data and regularly back it up, keep antivirus software and system updates up to date, and secure data against hackers.
If you find your business is struggling to keep up with the demands involved with monitoring your IT, finding a proactive IT partner is definitely the right choice for you. Excedeo’s Managed IT Services and IT Support can help you achieve more productivity with fewer disruptions. From planning and budgeting to making sure you stay up to date on technology, you need to keep your business running smoothly. We help small and medium-sized businesses succeed. Take control of the safety of your technology and contact Excedeo.