Business continuity matters all the time, but especially in times of crisis – just look at the impact of COVID-19 on the economy. A pandemic, economic downturn, hurricane, civil unrest or any number of other situations can wreak havoc on your operations. Without all your mission-critical systems online, you can’t serve your customers…generate revenue…employ staff. Downtime and inactivity cost jobs and money – and in some sectors, they can even cost lives.
This is why every business needs a fail-safe plan for keeping all its tech up and running through whatever disruption might come along. This is especially true in industries like enterprise IT, telecommunications, medical technology and industrial automation, where technology is an integral part of operations.
As an outsourced technical product support services provider, Source Support engages with customers and end-users across a variety of markets every day. The current global situation has brought to light crucial service trends – key ingredients for business continuity success through any disruptive circumstance. The most notable of these trends are: 1) a field service network that is built upon speed, sufficient geographical coverage, and resiliency, 2) high quality standards throughout the entire service experience, 3) maximum efficiency through technology that supports your team’s ability to work at scale.
- Speed, coverage and resiliency. You should have an infrastructure in place that enables field engineers (FEs) to be on site and working as fast as possible, with as much redundancy as possible, in case something doesn’t go as planned. If a flight is cancelled or if an FE is unwell, you should have confidence in the resiliency of your network to dispatch another FE to provide the same high quality support to your end-user and still meet the SLA for that service event. In our model, we have developed a field and application engineering network that is available anywhere in the world. This provides us the ability to have local, qualified FEs on site within 4 hours but also gives us opportunity to build resiliency. An additional benefit of this model is that we’re not constrained by traditional workforce costs.
- High quality standards. The ability to deliver service anywhere and anytime is one thing, but making sure that the entire service experience is a good one is just as important. After all, continuity doesn’t mean much if your customers aren’t happy with your service and don’t want to engage with you as a result. The right training on products, processes, customer service best practices, industry knowledge, and more at the right time is key, and you should build it into your plan. At Source, we also nurture and engage with our field service engineers beyond training – they are an extension of our culture and we expect the same high quality standards from them as we hold for ourselves.
- Maximum efficiency. The smarter the technology in your service infrastructure, and the more you can maximize scalability to meet growing demand, the better it is for your business, the greater the support it will provide to your team, and the more resilient it will be in times of crisis. Source has invested in technology and will continue to do so; we continuously look for ways to innovate and improve so that our service management system, like bionic pop culture icon Steve Austin, can be “better, stronger, faster”.
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