3 Ways to Avoid the High Cost of Low Network Availability

What would it cost your business to lose Internet connectivity—even for a short time?

Consider, for instance, the inaccessibility of your digital phone system and your contact center’s inability to process credit cards.

Who can help—quickly? The outside IT guy? Your Internet service provider (ISP)? You go for the ISP. But where’s that telephone number again?

As you gather the information you’ll need to navigate the service request, you realize that each minute your business is offline means a potential hit to your bottom line.

Time passes

You tackle the pre-human telephone questionnaire on your cell phone like it was a battle of keypad jujitsu. Total time: 6 minutes.

While you’re happy to be one step closer to speaking with a fellow human, you are, nevertheless, frustrated to look up and observe additional signs of lost productivity: employees just standing around, unable to carry out their assigned tasks—and getting paid for it.

Help arrives?

Tom’s on the phone. He’s ready to assist you—but, first, he has to confirm your information. It should only take a moment, he says.

As you describe your problem with growing urgency, Tom determines that he is unable to immediately help and must transfer you to someone who can. Please hold.

The rest all seems like a blur, up to the point when the tech support rep says that he’ll try to schedule a visit for today—sometime before the close of business. The nightmare scenario continues with no end in sight.

Sound familiar?

Costs pile up

According to IHS, IT downtime costs $1 million a year for a typical midsize company and over $60 million for a large enterprise. If your business’s success is tied to Internet connectivity, then you should make every effort to ensure you have the most reliable connection available.

Unfortunately, some organizations overlook this key component of their business model—usually as a presumed money-saving tactic.

A new hope

From meetings in enterprise boardrooms to riding shotgun down camp roads on a golf cart, I meet with a variety of business owners and IT directors frequently. They all have similar mission-critical business tasks.

Outages happen. To gain the confidence that your network can overcome them, deliver on your business objectives and help you capture opportunities, there are three key indicators of a solid ISP:
 

1. U.S.-based experts, certified by the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), who proactively monitor, support and secure a fiber-based network 24/7/365. The MEF certification is the ISP’s third-party guarantee that its employees are held to a high standard.
   
   
2. End-to-end service-level agreements (SLAs) that guarantee uptime and timely restoration of your services if a problem does arise.
   
   
3. The ability to quickly scale your connection as your organization encounters new operational demands (e.g., the addition of bandwidth-intensive apps) that can slow a network down.

I’ve seen growth in confidence happen with Hagadone Corporation, a multifaceted business serving numerous industries. Hagadone enhanced its clients’ experiences, benefited from streamlined network services from their ISP, improved productivity and experienced growth thanks to the right network partner. See how Hagadone worked with an ISP to gain this added business value.