World Economic Forum published top 10 job skills of tomorrow. In our blog series you will get a deeper dive into each one of these skills of tomorrow.

Improving customer experiences with proactive technology monitoring 

After years of being buzzwords, new technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Cloud, and the Internet of Things (IoT) have made their way into businesses and are now operational realities. Business and IT are now inextricably connected thanks to the digital revolution. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Because, in this digital age, customer experience has become an integral aspect of IT performance challenges.  

No matter the industry you’re in, an IT support company that manages your customers IT Infrastructure, or a company that is making wearable widgets and gadgets, you need a technology monitoring solution. When your services go offline you need to need to know what happened, to be able to fix it and continue serving customers. Without monitoring, we are just waiting in the dark for the first angry complaints to arrive from our customers. Even after the complaints come in, we still might not have a clear picture of what is the problem or what caused it. As with our own bodies, it is important to have proactive checkups on our operations. With careful analysis we might be able to tell beforehand that systems are not working as intended. Which is why it is important for businesses to move from reactive monitoring to proactive monitoring. When your company’s IT helps end users even before they send a support request, your operations become more efficient and user satisfaction improves. So, the first step is to gain the ability to know when things go wrong. Start small. 

To stay ahead of the problems, monitored systems will need real-time notifications to transition from reactive to proactive support. Are you perhaps able to create automatic tickets when services go offline? Do you receive alerts when a device’s status changes? Or what if we venture further into that idea? What if your system could automatically solve the problem and then notify that it has been resolved? Then all you would have to do is sit back and relax. While this is obviously not viable for every problem today, there are a few instances when this level of anticipatory support is already possible. Maybe your printer’s ink supply is running low. Instead of simply informing you that your printer is low on ink, your system should be able to determine what type of ink you require by detecting the printer’s make and model and automatically placing an order and having it delivered to the location. Other common solutions already available are firmware updates. Manual firmware updates are frequently required for devices. If it’s a known update, you can have it installed automatically so that your devices are constantly up to date. This kind of proactive help automation is the way technology support will be in the future. 

The key element of any IT service is its performance, and the availability of the service is a highly valuable factor in determining the quality of a customer’s experience. High response times impact the customer experience in the same way as a slow payment process on a website would, it might just make the customer abandon the purchase. Everyday more and more devices are connected to the internet and the technological progress is not showing any signs of slowing down. This means that whatever your implementation is it needs to be ready to respond to the future challenges of an optimized customer experience. How will you stay ahead of your customers? 

– Joop Tenhunen