Businesses worldwide rely on technology to thrive and survive in the 21st century.
Your IT should be seamless 24x7x365. To do that, your service provider should be capable of running it efficiently. They should help your business operate with as few problems as possible.
This circumstance made IT response times a critical piece in maintaining smooth business operations.
Whenever businesses have IT troubles, their operations can come to a standstill. This impact can ultimately affect their profits and customers, among many other things.
Only exceptional IT support can help them get back up and running as soon as possible.
Yet, time is a critical component of every business, so what if their response time takes longer than expected?
Poor IT support only creates expensive consequences for businesses. This made effective IT support more crucial than ever, and it’s unfortunate that many still don’t realise the value this brings to their business and end up settling with a substandard IT support company.
On that note, below are the most common ways poor IT support can negatively affect your business:
Unproductive Staff
When your IT isn’t working, your staff is also not working. Poor IT support negatively impacts internal business operations, whether you’re a large corporation or a small to medium-sized business. This problem ultimately affects employee productivity. In order to prevent it, you will need a dedicated team to look out for your IT and ensure everything is running smoothly.
Put yourself in your staff’s shoes.
Wouldn’t you be frustrated if your work constantly gets interrupted due to IT-related issues?
If your employees work on an output-based model, they might have to work longer hours to compromise for the lost time.
Although this problem might be tolerable in the first few instances, if it keeps happening, it will lead to new issues that will ultimately affect your business.
You deserve better. Remember that your IT should work for you, not against you.
A good IT support provider should resolve issues quickly once they pop up, so your staff can remain productive and efficient.
Prone to Security Breaches
Aside from affecting employee productivity, poor IT support will also put your business at risk of security breaches. When your system is acting wonky, there might be an issue in one of your networks or worse, you're being hacked. If the problem is the latter, quick IT support can help mitigate the issue and prevent more damage.
When you’re settling for terrible IT support services, you’re welcoming cyber security breaches to your business.
Cyber threats are getting more vicious every day. If your system is not capable enough to fight them off, you will be under a full-blown attack that may temporarily or permanently handicap your business.
You don’t have to wait for a cyber-attack to happen to see if your IT support is competent or not.
Strong IT support companies will place cyber security solutions beforehand to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks in time. Although there is no guarantee that it will avert all kinds of cyber disasters from happening, it will reduce your chances of becoming a victim.
Business Downtime
Aside from employee productivity and security breaches, business downtime also arises when you have poor IT support.
Imagine a domino effect.
When your IT goes down, your staff can't access crucial documents, your cyber security is compromised, and by then, your customers won’t be getting the services they paid for. Ultimately, it will inconvenience everyone involved, and it won’t be over until your IT provider fixes the problem that is causing it. Ideally, for good.
Note that the longer it takes for them to fix it, the more it costs your business in terms of output, profit, and reputation. That’s why you must partner with an IT support company that will prioritise your success before theirs.
Bad Customer Reputation
Keeping your systems running well is extremely important if your business operations rely on them. Whenever you experience system downtime or a data breach, the receiving end of that will be your customers. And whenever they get substandard services, they lose trust in you.
This problem will earn you negative public feedback that may influence current and future customers from doing business with you.
Your business heavily relies on customer impressions to succeed in the 21st century.
Any dissatisfaction can cause extensive problems for your business. Remember, it only takes a few social media posts now to ruin your reputation. When that happens, your clients and hot prospects can quickly move to another provider that they feel is better.
There can be many different reasons that can cause poor customer reputation.
But when it comes to something that you can control, such as IT support, you should prioritise IT system uptime and security to keep your customers happy.
Profit Loss
Poor IT support doesn’t just affect cyber security, staff productivity, business operations and reputation. Ultimately, these consequences will lead to negative financial impacts.
When your IT service provider sucks at providing support, you suffer.
Think about this:
You can’t operate efficiently if your IT is malfunctioning, whether it’s because of system downtime or server malfunction). If that happens, you can’t deliver quality service to your customers. And this can lead them to switch to your competitors instead.
So not only are you losing customers and damaging your reputation because of subpar IT support, but you’re also wasting your tech budget on an ineffective service.
With a good IT support company, you can expect to get the most bang for your IT buck. They will be ready to sort out your IT troubles and protect your assets from internal and external disasters before they happen.
Why does poor IT support happen?
There are several reasons why IT service companies give bad IT support to their clients. We’ve listed the most common ones below:
Insufficient staff
This problem is mainly due to the lack of personnel. When your IT support takes too long to answer calls, there’s a huge possibility that they have too many clients yet fewer people working the helpdesk line. Although it may seem fine now, what if you have a time-sensitive IT support problem? What if it takes them too long to respond?
An ideal IT support company should assign you to a dedicated team that can cater to your IT troubles right away to get you back up and running ASAP.
Incompetent staff
IT support companies handle both simple and complex tech problems.
If you have a complex IT-related problem and it's taking too long for your service provider to fix the issue, there's a possibility they're incapable of solving the problem.
Skills and experience are critical to IT success, and if your service provider is lacking in that particular department, you'll face problems that will either be difficult to diagnose or remedy.
Worst-case scenario, this could backfire on your business and customers if not fixed.
A capable IT support company should be able to understand the core problems of your business and create solutions.
They should be equipped with the right people and technology to cater to your IT needs with little to no issues.
Poor IT support processes
Is your IT support team disorganised in handling tickets?
Do you feel like their processes are all over the place?
Or are they immature in addressing issues?
If that is the case, your managed IT service provider has a poor support process.
Poor handling of issues can lead to delayed support and mishandling of tickets. And when these pile up, your IT becomes chaotic to the point that it affects your operations entirely.
Typically, a good IT support provider should have a direct and straightforward process to address your issues without problems.
When choosing IT support companies, you should look for qualities such as:
- a proactive approach to handling tickets
- ticket response time
- support organisation & process
