If you run a small or medium-size business, there’s plenty to worry about these days. Between supply chain issues, the shortage of skilled employees and what appears to be the new norm – hybrid work schedules – you depend more than ever on your technology ecosystem. And your customers depend on your IT technology just as much as your employees do. As Gartner has stated, “The future of IT infrastructure is always on, always available and everywhere.” This is especially true in today’s mobile business environment, for both your employees and your customers. At the end of each day, the success of your business depends on your success with your customers, and that goes well beyond products alone.
Today’s “always-on world” has changed how every business, big or small, operates.
To ensure long-term success, SMBs need to think more like larger enterprises and focus on every aspect of customer perception, from brand and reputation to the quality of products and the level of customer service. As Salesforce reports, many SMBs are investing in digitization and technology to engage customers and enhance experiences throughout the sales cycle – from raising brand awareness among prospects to maintaining the loyalty of long-time customers.
That means technology touches every part of the customer journey, and ‘customer success’ is an outcome of a great experience along that journey. What does customer success look like for a small business, and how is it measured? In very simple terms, it is reducing risk, ensuring that your business – as well as the product or services you provide to customers – are “always on, always available, and everywhere.” Technology impacts almost every area of your organization’s customer success; such as e-commerce, customer data protection, and front and back office operations. Our customer success model is built on three technology pillars, Productivity, Security and Flexibility. These pillars are the foundation to our guaranteed outcomes; that your IT infrastructure and operations will be “always on, always available, and everywhere.”
Technology is what’s driving outcome-based ‘customer success’ these days. If your company is expanding, or needing to find new ways to optimize your productivity and efficiency, utilizing the three-pillar model has helped many organizations better define where they can optimize and achieve their outcomes. Oftentimes the basics are overlooked – are your users and customers able to easily perform their job functions or use your products? Are safeguards in place to ensure that your brand and your customers are protected? Is your organization flexible, easily accessible and scalable regardless of where your users or customers are? These fundamental questions play key roles in improving customer success and driving your overall growth strategies.
But all these opportunities come with challenges, especially for SMBs. Can you relate?
Are your IT outcomes getting realized?
With an estimated 60% of the knowledge workforce operating remotely and an estimated 18% never returning to the office, this has led many organizations to quickly pivot critical infrastructure services from on-premises to cloud-based services. This has effectively shifted the IT Estate to an Ecosystem that is comprised of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) collaboration-based services. This has led to an increasing adoption of turnkey solutions that provide systems, tools and applications in a single platform interface, and utilizing IT Services partners who support and deliver turnkey (all-in-one) solutions that ensure:
What Konica Minolta’s IT Services Division, All Covered has further discovered is that in this new IT Ecosystem, many organizations in their need to move quickly are now experiencing issues around cloud security breaches and misconfigurations. According to a recent poll conducted by Threat Post, 20% of the poll participants stated that they had experienced a cyberattack on their cloud within the last calendar year, while 38% had a problem with data exposure due to misconfiguration – which the survey revealed is the biggest issue for companies. Every year ransomware attacks further drive up costs, and more and more small businesses are investing in cyber insurance to further protect business assets.
The solution for SMBs is to simplify IT from every angle, inside and out.
All Covered Assurance is the comprehensive, integrated and turnkey (all-in-one) platform that provides a complete managed services experience. We guarantee outcomes that ensure user productivity, system readiness, data availability and complete security; delivered with total visibility and governance across the IT landscape. All Covered Assurance integrates all the fundamental tools, services and applications in a single platform to keep businesses running efficiently – with the additional benefit of technical support and an on-demand helpdesk. This all-in-one solution benefits your business with growth in three key areas:
These three pillars of All Covered Assurance work together to make sure your business is always on and always available, from everywhere your employees and customers may be.
The Productivity pillar ensures that users can access “always on” applications, business systems and data. The Security pillar delivers modern threat intelligence, a multi-pronged strategy that layers offense and defense detection and protection techniques. And the Flexibility pillar allows your business to pivot quickly and provide services from everywhere, including support for remote users and mobile devices. This assurance, or guarantee, is what our customers can rely on so they can stop managing IT and focus on their business.
All Covered Assurance is your assurance that your business can do business, day in and day out. It safeguards you, your employees and your customers from frustrating, time-consuming and costly IT system issues that can prevent you from meeting your goals and growing the business you want.
Learn more about All Covered Assurance online.
