At its core, your business exists to provide value to your clients. While technology often feels like a behind-the-scenes necessity, it is actually the engine that drives your customer experience. By optimizing your internal operations with the right tools, you don't just work faster; you serve better.
In storytelling, there’s a structure that the vast majority of stories follow, regardless of the format: introduction, rising action, conflict, falling action, resolution. The rising action and the conflict are what give the story its appeal—they’re the source of all the tension that keeps things moving forward. They’re where the stress and the drama live; they keep the story interesting.
That said, when it comes to your business (and its IT in particular), you want its story to break this format. You want things to be, for lack of a better term, boring.
“Persuasion.” “Percussive Maintenance.” Whatever you call hitting your computer to make it work, we get it. We’ve all been there. Your Wi-Fi router drops the signal for the third time during a meeting, or your TV remote decides to go on strike. In a fit of frustration, you give it a firm slap; and miraculously, it starts working again.
The purpose of your business is to deliver goods or services to your target customers or clients. To this end, you can use technology to dramatically improve operations and create a better product for your consumers. Let’s discuss how you can use technology to build better internal practices to in turn create a better customer experience.
Few things in the office are as frustrating as Internet connectivity issues, right? The router is right there, you seem to have a strong Wi-Fi signal, but your virtual meeting keeps disconnecting. What gives?
The reason is simple: a signal’s strength isn’t the same as how much information can get through. The difference is key to focusing on the right metrics and—most importantly—ensuring your team can work the way they need to.
In IT services, we often use the iceberg analogy to describe the Internet. The Surface Web, the sites you browse daily, is just the 10 percent visible above the waterline. Below that lies the Deep Web, and at the murky bottom is the Dark Web.
For a business owner, the Dark Web isn’t just a concept from a spy movie; it is a sophisticated, unregulated marketplace where your company’s data is the primary commodity (and target). If your information is down there, it’s not a matter of if someone will use it, but when.
Most businesses don’t have what it takes to survive a hardware failure or natural disaster, and we don’t mean in terms of “grit.” What we mean is in the sheer technological capacity to recover their data and continue operations. It’s bizarre, too, how easy data backup can be, provided you follow these three key tenets. With a little help from a qualified backup professional, your business can stay resilient even in the worst of times.
The conversation around B2B data security is no longer about having a backup, but about whether your backup actually works when you need it most. Data backup and disaster recovery solutions were once seen as “set it and forget it” tools, but this is no longer the case. In reality, your data backup strategy is much more complex, and if you fail to give it the attention it deserves, it could result in an extinction-level event for your business.
Sometimes the scariest part of running a business is not knowing what tomorrow will bring, particularly when it comes to your IT. Break-fix IT is one of the leading causes of anxiety amongst small business owners, but it doesn’t have to be. Managed IT offers a reprieve from the chaos and the unknown so you can be confident about the direction your business is heading.
Shadow IT is a big problem, no matter where it’s being used—even at the most famous toy manufacturer in history’s facility. Consider this a case study of why it is essential to listen to your IT department, especially when it comes to the tools they provide.