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    Understanding Managed Services and How They Benefit SMBs   Small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) receive a lot of calls each day from slick sales people peddling the next technology trend that's going to save them money and revolutionize how they do business. They're all too quick to caution that if you don't listen to them, you'll fall behind the times, and eventually be swimming in a sea of debt and out of business.   No doubt you've heard, or you've at least read about, the benefits of managed services. Managed services refer to clearly defined outsourced IT services delivered to you at predictable costs. You know the exact IT services you'll be getting and what you'll pay for them. There is no surprise sky-high bill for services rendered. So are solicitation calls that pertain to managed services worth listening to? We think so. Then again, we're in the managed services industry. There may be a bit of a bias here.   How Managed Service Prov

    Are Managed IT Services Right For You? A Few Things to Consider   How do you get a small business to recognize the value of manages IT services? In the start-up environment, we encounter an eclectic bunch of personality types. There is a reason people become entrepreneurs or C-level execs. When we meet the owners or decision makers at smaller companies and organizations, we can tell right away why they're where they are. They're visionaries. They're risk takers. They're competitive. They want to be in charge.   Therefore, they aren't always quick to place the fate of their business technology in the hands of a third party. They've come as far as they have by being in control and they're hesitant to give up that control. But we've learned a few things along the way.   For example, the Type A personality is highly independent but also very competitive. So we tap into the competitive advantage that managed IT services gives them.   The Type B personalit

    Breaking News: Downtime Kills Small Businesses   Downtime is bad news for any business whether big or small.   A recent two-hour New York Times' downtime occurrence sent Twitter ablaze and their stock price plummeting.   Google going down for one to five hours resulted in lost revenue up to $500,000 and decreased overall web traffic by 40%.   We know what you're thinking. Holy crap, Google makes $100,000 an hour? Yeah... insane, huh?   While the hourly cost of downtime for a small-to-medium sized business won't be nearly as large as that astronomical Google figure, downtime is often more detrimental to smaller companies. Smaller enterprises are more susceptible to downtime and are neither large nor profitable enough to sustain its short and long-term effects.   Downtime Leads to Unhappy/Unproductive Employees   Even the happiest of employees become dissatisfied when they can't perform basic day-to-day job functions or properly service customers or clients.   While s

The contact center and omni-channel communications   We’ve talked in other blogs about the value of contact centers over traditional, one -  dimensional call centers, but we haven't talked yet about the need for contact centers to be designed on the omni-channel model. This blog explains what omni-channel means and why this is a critical part of the contact center design.   Omni-channel refers to a specific model of multi-channel communications. We already know a contact center makes use of many different modes of communications in order to best meet all of your customers wherever they choose to be. But we haven’t talked about the fact that contact centers need to be omni-channel. In the omni-channel model, all of the channels are integrated.  The idea here is to allow for cross channel “communication” so that the information and customer data that is accumulated on one channel is immediately communicated to all the other extant channels. The goal: whenever a customer connects on a

  Is That a Business Continuity Plan in Your Pocket or a Bunch of Jargon?   Technology is full of difficult jargon. To further complicate things, certain terms are often used in a different context between one publication or service provider and the next. An example of this is the usage of backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity. These terms are commonly used interchangeably, often resulting in confusion. In an effort to alleviate some of this confusion, let's describe each physical process. You will see an overlay among all three, although they are each different processes.   Backup –  In IT lingo, the most basic description of backup is the act of copying data, as in files or programs, from its original location to another. The purpose of this is to ensure that the original files or programs are retrievable in the event of any accidental deletion, hardware or software failure, or any other type of tampering, corruption and theft.   It's important to remember that t

4 reasons customers prefer contact centers   You may have read that call centers are beginning to take a back seat to contact centers, where customers and prospects can interact across a wide array of communication modes. Today we’re discussing four big reasons customers prefer contact centers.   As a reminder, contact centers offer customers a variety of communication channels: voice, email, text, chat box, social media, and others. New generations are very familiar with non-voice communication channels and may prefer these channels over voice. People now are accustomed to using non-voice channels for most of their personal and business communications needs. Voice has become a secondary method, at best, for many users. Self-service has become the norm. Customers have become accustomed to self-service options that require no interaction and are available on-demand. Social media has become an important channel of customer interaction. This is a particularly important issue.

    8 Cold Hard Truths for SMBs Not Worried About Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity   The foundation of any successful business continuity solution is the ability to retrieve data from any point in time from anywhere. When the topic of data recovery and business continuity comes up, you get the feeling that many decision makers at smaller businesses and organizations wish they could channel their inner six year old, simply cover their ears, and sing "La, la, la. I Can't Hear You. I'm Not Listening."   Everybody thinks bad things only happen to other people. Just because we hear about a fatal car accident on the morning news, doesn't mean we fixate on that news when we ourselves get into a car and drive to work.   So no matter how many times the owner or executive of a small to midsize business (SMB) hears of other small businesses being crippled by hurricanes, tornados, fires, or flooding, they aren't necessarily overcome with fear to the point that th