It happened again! Your network hit some kind of glitch and the whole office is staring at frozen screens. You tried “turning it off and turning it back on again.” That didn’t help.

The answer is simple: You need help desk.

Help desk is a group of techs you can call when there’s something wrong with your computers or your network. They help with everything from resetting a password to rebooting the network.

The people at the help desk are there 24 hours a day or however many hours your office is open. They answer questions about everything from your desktop programs to what’s happening with your servers.

In short, they’re there to make sure that your technology keeps functioning exactly as you need it to.

Does a small or medium-sized business need a help desk? Yes.

Every time someone can’t get their computer to start or loses a password, you’re losing money. Even if you’re the only person in your company, do you really want to spend a lot of your time figuring what’s wrong with your computers?

Very often, help desks are paired with managed IT services. Managed IT makes sure that your network is up-to-date and running smoothly. They do all the maintenance on your systems, often even physical maintenance.

By pairing managed IT and your help desk, you’ll know that you have a team answering the phone that really understands all of your systems and programs. When you call them, no matter what the questions are, they’ll know how to help you get back to work fast.

Yes, definitely.

IT companies, like Everound, know that not everyone needs a help desk every day. We offer a variety of packages to choose from.

• On-call – This is one that most people think of. The company pays to have a team on call 24 hours a day. This is ideal if you have a team that works 24 hours a day. This can help prevent the boss from getting calls at 2 am on a Sunday morning. This type of service is almost always part of the larger managed IT services programs.
• Limited Hours – You can get IT help desks that are only available during your business hours. If your company works Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, you don’t need someone to answer program questions on Saturday afternoon. Talk to your help desk provider to see if they can offer this type of assistance. It’s less expensive.
• On-Demand – You can arrange for a help desk provider to simply bill you for whatever time they’re on the phone or fixing issues. That might be an hour one month and 10 hours the next. While this might be unpredictable, you’ll know you’re spending money when you do it.

The easiest way to find out what’s best for your needs is to schedule a call with a help desk provider. Talk about the size of your company, how often you need help, what types of systems and computer programs you have, and your budget. Together, you can come up with something that works for your company.

An IT help desk is a great investment in your customer relations, as well.

• Ecommerce – If you have an online store, you don’t want to lose a sale because the customer is having problems with your system. A 24-hour help desk can chat or speak with your customers to help them get their orders placed. Companies that don’t offer a help desk can lose thousands of dollars every month just because a customer is not clicking a button or is confused.
• Mobile apps – Apps can give customers fits. If you have an ecommerce app or other complex app that your customers need to navigate, you need someone there to answer questions and fix problems.
• Ticketing and scheduling – For important things, like concerts and doctors’ offices, scheduling is important. Being able to assure someone that their appointment or seat is reserved is the difference between staying in business and losing a lot of customers.
• Personal accounts – Any business that allows customers to have a personal account, whether it has money on it or not, needs a help desk. If a customer has information that they will need access to, you need someone there to help if there’s a problem.

In short, customers like help desks. They’re used to them. Not having someone to help quickly can mean the difference between more sales and more brand loyalty and having a lot of very angry customers.

Do you get a return on your investment with small- and medium-sized business help desks?

Definitely. If you choose the right plan, that one that fits your company’s needs, it will help you take better care of your staff, keep your customers happy, and reduce downtime. You’re less likely to lose sales to broken technology. Your staff will spend a lot less time looking for answers or just staring at a blank screen.

It’s easy to find one of those big help desk companies. They are everywhere with their advertising and you’ve even interacted with them. But they’re often not the right choice. One-size-fits-all programs and canned answers aren’t necessarily great customer service.

The reality is that a smaller company, like Everound, provide your customers, both internal and external, with better, more personal service. A room full of help desk people reading canned answers from a screen is not the personal touch that most small- and medium-size businesses want.

In other words, choose a help desk company that’s closer to your company’s size to ensure that every interaction is as personal and professional as the ones you have with everyone.

Everound has been successfully engaging and supporting businesses to adapt to this new era of remote workers. From every facet of a company’s IT, we can assist, from employee experience to data center to cybersecurity and much more. If you need assistance transitioning your company to a work-from-home environment, we can help. Contact us today by calling us at +1 717.312.5890!

COVID-19 hit, and all your employees went home to work. We all thought this would be temporary, last only a few weeks, maybe a month… Employers are now seeing remote work is possible. Users can be efficient from a spare bedroom. What does this mean for IT? How can we make sure our company is secure? How do we optimize our budget? Let’s talk.

Let’s review what will need to be accessed by employees. Commonly, file servers are still used by many small to mid-sized businesses for their low cost and easy management. While this is ideal when employees are onsite, you are now over utilizing your firewall with VPN and slowing transmission speeds from your users downloading and constantly accessing large files. Solutions such as Egnyte, Dropbox and SharePoint can offload your data to a secure cloud while retaining IT security and disaster management over the files.

Next, you have applications on local servers. Consider VDI or Remote Desktop to minimize access. By using VDI, we can narrow down VPN access to one entry point and control the traffic. VDI will also give you the ability to increase resources to the backend of the infrastructure to, you guessed it, improve your user experience!

The key to success here is to keep thinking, constantly review your environment. What do your users need access to? Ask why. Shutdown, remove or lockdown the areas that will not need to be accessed remotely.

Can we offload old applications? How many times are we hanging onto legacy apps or databases for no reason other than lack of time or the disruption to users? Well now disruption is everyday! Now is the time to review these systems. Is there a better cloud app out there? In most cases, a couple minutes of “Googling” lands you a solution someone with the same problem decided to fix and sell.

Selling these applications to the CEO can be easy. Remind him how Joe spends 3 hours each day connecting to VPN, opening an SRSS report, running a report, exporting to CSV, formatting, and saving to PDF only to email it to 30 colleagues. This new app automatically emails the report every morning and there’s a mobile app! Sold! Another server decommissioned and more users off VPN.

Spend the time to understand what your users need to be successful. Use this knowledge to present new solutions.

Are you still in control? How are you handling group policies and windows patching? The traditional SCCM build isn’t going to work if no one is connecting to VPN. Consider solutions such as Azure Admin Center, Datto, PolicyPAK, ManageEngine or VMware Workspace One. All provide many tools to help with RMM, group policies, software installs and windows patching for your remote users.

Identify areas of your network that are no longer used. We’ve just looked at areas where you will need to spend money to improve the experience of your employees and also to keep them secure. Now we need to identify where we can reduce cost.

Look at your circuits, do you have empty offices or servers with less applications that can be combined. Review the use of your PRIs and VOIP platform. Finding areas to reduce cost and using that budget to optimize your infrastructure with new technology is proof of a successful IT professional.

Key to any changes you make, is to be aligned with your company. Speak with the President, CEO or board. Understand the needs and direction they plan to take long term. Your agility to adapt to their vision will solidify the success of your department.

Additional reading can be found here https://www.cio.com/article/3545534/sharp-it-budget-cuts-expected-in-wake-of-covid-19.html.

Everound has been successfully engaging and supporting businesses to adapt to this new era of remote workers. From every facet of a company’s IT, we can assist, from employee experience to data center to cybersecurity and much more. If you need assistance transitioning your company to a work from home environment, we can help. Contact us today using the contact form below or by calling us at +1 717.312.5890!