ATM's Fix Before Fail Solutions
Are IT service companies getting it all wrong? Just imagine the scene. It's the end of the month and your staff are busy keying in customer orders. Then the server running the sales order processing system crashes without warning. You call in the IT services company for help who take three hours to fix the problem and restore your business applications.
The service level agreement ensured that your call for help was answered in 30 seconds. A help desk engineer rang back within half an hour to discuss the problem. A technician then turned up on-site, fixed some faulty hardware and reloaded the system successfully. While everything was completed within the pre-agreed times, three hours work was lost.
It's an all-too-familiar story that's repeated across the country daily. Service level agreements always give you great confidence that any such problems are fixed promptly. But all you can do to improve them is to play the numbers game. Asking for quicker response times, faster fixes and slicker telephone answering will often cost you more.
This approach is too much like fire fighting. When your systems have a problem, you call somebody to fix them. The response received is measured against the service level agreement and it's easy to see when performance slips. But I now believe that problem prevention is the way forward.
Around two years ago, my company was looking for a new way to excel in the competitive IT services marketplace. We wanted to provide an improved level of customer service yet not be caught up a spiral of ever-faster responses. What's more, our customers were always demanding the best possible value which added to the pressure.
We started to think carefully about prevention. Could we really avoid the problem in the first place? Fixing systems before they fail became our goal; avoiding the disruptive downtime that always strikes unexpectedly. If we succeeded, there was no need for unplanned call-outs because the problem just wouldn't be left to happen.
Fix Before Fail Solutions
The challenge to deliver a fix-before-fail service, as we've since termed it, isn't trivial. You have to know your customers' systems extremely well. This means using automated software tools to collect performance information constantly. At the simplest level, such technology might help solve traditional call-outs quickly. Taken a little further, the tools might even suggest a course of action.
A true fix-before-fail solution has to do rather more. For example, a failure to complete a sales transaction may be the application itself, a problem with the database or perhaps a disk running out of space. It's also worth remembering the 80-20 rule here: 80 per cent of the time is spent finding the problem, and just 20 per cent on fixing it. An effective fix-before-fail system has to do both.
Over the last two years, we've taken these ideas and carefully refined them by investing 1.5m into major new centralised facilities. We can now take full advantage of customers' modern high availability hardware with built-in (yet surprisingly little used) management features. While sophisticated software monitoring tools regularly assist us with the call-out business, we've also deployed them in new fix-before-fail situations.
Take e-mail. One of our local authority customers has a heavily used e-mail system that periodically stops working. As the customer couldn't upgrade to solve the problem, our remote monitoring tools now keep an eye on the service. If early signs of failure are detected, the service is automatically halted, housekeeping tasks run and everything reloaded. Result? No more lengthy e-mail stoppages.
Another customer, with few in-house IT skills, relies on our expert remote monitoring to achieve fix before fail. Software tools automatically alert us to performance issues or adverse trends so pre-emptive corrective action is taken. The bottom line is a 50 per cent reduction in annual IT related costs: that's proactive support within a fixed price contract.
A Scottish university offers a virtual campus service used by thousands of students in over 100 countries. Backed by a hardware maintenance service, our remote monitoring constantly, yet invisibly, tracks the system health for Web pages, database, chat, Internet payment and a development environment. Any problems are spotted and fixed before services are affected for total peace of mind.
So why aren't more people using such fix-before-fail solutions for IT help desk and managed services? The call-them-out-if-the-system-breaks attitude is deeply ingrained across business, partly because it's easy to set up. But by fixing before failure, you can save IT users substantial amounts of time and money to ensure maximum value from existing investments. And if you quietly solve the small issues without fuss before they become noticeable, then customer satisfaction will reach new heights.
About Remote Support Desk
Remote Support Desk offers a safe and secure mechanism for the monitoring or controlling of network infrastructure, server farms and the desktop. By using automated monitoring tools, it reduces the dependency on people and enables IT Departments to deliver consistent services. Remote Support Desk allows ATM staff to access and fix user systems remotely. The proactive diagnostic nature of the service ensures the integrity of business critical applications and infrastructure.
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