An IT Support Blog from London

Exceptional customer service is par for the course today as businesses are getting more competitive. Besides, given the general reliance on technology, and with some people being less tech-savvy than others, support services have become even more of a necessity.

That customers demand more and better in terms of customer service is also a factor that enterprises should seriously consider. According to software company Freshworks’ collection of customer service statistics for 2023, “64% of customers want a reply within an hour of posting on Twitter, and 85% of customers said they expect a company to respond within six hours.” Quite a tall order, that.

But as to what type of support service should be offered is something that businesses have to identify first: is it technical support or customer support? Confusion between the two is rather common and because of this, the terms are often used interchangeably. This blog post will look into the key differences between tech support and customer support, and why it’s essential to know the distinction.

First off, let’s review their definitions.

Technology is the core element that drives the business operations of most organisations—from the hardware store down the street that uses cloud solutions for inventory and accounting, to the multinational enterprise that stores data and workloads in a hosted private cloud. With such heavy reliance on IT, you need to make sure that your IT organisation is an optimised, well-oiled machine that brings the most business value.

In this post, we dive into a basic understanding of IT service management (ITSM), why it’s important, and how it can help you best manage your IT initiatives to enable effective service delivery. So, first things first:

Bill Gates once famously said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest sources of learning.” Well, in this day and age when technology rules, less-than-satisfied customers can also be a strong impetus for innovation.

When it comes to innovating and making groundbreaking changes across most industries, artificial intelligence (AI) has been leading the pack over the past decade. Machine learning algorithms are being widely used in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, agriculture, and yes, AI is even highly-leveraged in emergencies and rescue missions.

All that said, customer support for enterprises should be a cinch for artificial intelligence and its subfields, right? No lie there. Already, the Conversational AI Market is anticipated to surge to $40.5 billion by 2032; a 17% increase from the $8.33 billion volume in 2022. This isn’t all that surprising considering how chatbots, virtual agents, and other AI business support applications in general, have totally changed the game in enhancing the customer experience.

To say that cloud computing is a game changer is a gross understatement. It has transformed the way organisations consume technology, allowing businesses to acquire cost-effective resources on demand—from ‘access anywhere’ storage to virtualised computing hardware. Cloud solutions have also upended traditional workplace practices in favour of a distributed workforce and real-time online collaboration.

The cloud has indeed significantly impacted the way technology has evolved over the years but it isn’t quite done yet. Today’s revolutionary tech trends are largely driven by cloud computing and, with hardware and software procurement made faster, it’s easier for enterprises to deploy new cloud services and tools that can help with their business needs.

All that said, we discuss in this post what the latest trends and technologies in cloud computing are and how you as an organisation can leverage these for your business.

Artificial intelligence has been growing in leaps and bounds in the last decade, making processes easier and bringing about significant changes in almost every industry. It’s not surprising that the AI global market is expected to hit US$ 1.8 trillion by 2030, from just US$ 136 billion in 2022. Now while most of us have had some experience with AI-assisted online shopping and have definitely heard of autonomous vehicles—some of the most well-known applications of AI, there’s a lot more out there.

A recently-introduced AI-powered technology has created such a huge impact across many fields, with social media feeds inundated by reviews and potential use cases of this tool. We’re talking about OpenAI’s ChatGPT. In this post, we discuss what it is and how it works, why it’s gaining a lot of attention, and how it can be relevant to your business.

No organisation today can function without technology. Gone is the traditional office environment and with it, the tons of paperwork, adding machines, airmail envelopes, and the trusty old landline. Even in-person meetings and physical reporting for work have become optional. What has become indispensable in the modern workplace instead, is the assortment of IT devices—servers, desktops, laptops, connectivity devices, smartphones, etc., as well as IT services and applications for every business process.

An enterprise’s IT hardware and software components however are only as good as their capacity to function effectively, and the users’ collective ability to utilise them. Consider the potential loss of opportunity for instance, if an ecommerce website experienced downtime for even a few hours. Or think about the employees’ wasted time if they are unable to use their PCs or access their work applications due to some technical issue. This is where the value of IT support is most apparent.

With cybersecurity, you really don’t know what to prepare for. Organisations think they’ve got everything covered, then something comes completely out of left field. No wonder the ongoing battle in the online security field is sometimes referred to as a cat and mouse game—the black hat malicious actors are busy discovering vulnerabilities in IT systems, and the white hat defenders are scrambling to counter the threats.

Undergoing a digital transformation (DX) has been a top business objective for many organisations over the last decade. With the availability of a wide range of technological tools and processes these days, it’s only natural for companies to want to leverage these tools to promote business growth. Despite the efforts, investment, and time that enterprises channel into a digital strategy however, the reality is that a good portion of digital transformation projects fail.

There are many factors that can contribute to DX failure. In this post, we discuss the 5 key reasons why success could be out of reach, and how you can counter these challenges so your company can forge a better path. But first what is digital transformation?

Threats to organisations continue to grow according to a report by Netherlands-based Surfshark. Based on the VPN company’s findings, 108.9 million accounts experienced data breaches in the 3rd of 2022—a whopping 70% surge on a quarter-by-quarter basis.

The continuing rise in successful attacks despite the availability of tools that can help monitor incoming threats may be attributed to the lack of cybersecurity incident management. This means that security alerts that could have effectively warned against impending risks were left unattended, leaving enterprises vulnerable.

Now that most organisations are all caught up and aboard the cloud computing train, the focus has now shifted to discovering and unlocking the promised value of the cloud. While the cloud’s elasticity and agility have provided enterprise-grade IT infrastructure to smaller businesses without incurring heavy capital expenditures, it has also led to significant waste of resources and difficulty in controlling cloud spending.

A McKinsey Digital article reveals that a whopping 80% of companies find it challenging to manage cloud spend. Further, the Anodot 2022 State of Cloud Cost survey reports that 49% of businesses struggle with cloud costs. This scenario is certainly not what enterprises anticipated when they decided to embark on the cloud journey. Fortunately, there’s a sound approach to managing costs so you can maximise your cloud solutions; it’s called cloud cost optimisation.