A company has found a unique way to improve customer service and beat its competitors. The company’s IT staff was told to put aside their routine activities for two weeks and compete in an internal hackathon. The goal was to identify a business problem and find a solution. At first, the company’s leaders were unsure of what they had started, but at the end of the two weeks, they were blown away by the ideas that surfaced. One team implemented a tracking app that showed customers the real-time location of delivery trucks, which boosted customer satisfaction and reduced calls to the company’s help desk by 75 percent. This exercise showed how big the payoff can be when skilled IT workers devote more time to helping their company succeed rather than fighting infrastructure fires or performing routine activities like software patching.
To enable IT to work more strategically, managed IT services are the answer. Managed services can deliver a wide variety of capabilities, ranging from computing, storage, and networking resources to mobility management, cybersecurity, email, and unified communications, including telephony services. The best service providers offer ongoing management and maintenance of the underlying infrastructure, service guarantees, and end-user support. North American companies spend $154 billion on managed services, with SMBs being among the top customers. Managed services offer improved operational performance, reduced operational risk, cost avoidance, and accelerated innovation.
To find the best match for managed IT services, SMB leaders should consider five important criteria. They should choose a technology partner who focuses primarily on the business, values long-term relationships, has a comprehensive service portfolio, addresses existing technology pain points, and insists on close communications. Managed services extend IT operations and free IT professionals to do what they do best – make the business more successful.