When a business’ Internet goes out, it can cause many headaches – not the least of which is a loss of revenue. The less downtime, the better for business. So what can be done to protect from the damage caused by outages and keep your business always on?
What Is an Always On Service?
An always on service, as its name suggests, helps ensure continuous Internet service even when problems are occurring. It does this through the use of backup systems.
When one system goes down, say a DSL connection, the backup, perhaps cable, is already there working for the business. In this way, the outage is barely even noticeable and is fixed quickly thus causing as few problems as possible. To stop as many outages as possible, it is wise to use an always-on service. Here are five reasons why this is a great idea for your business:
It will save revenue.
In an article for Ad Week, Shea Bennett pointed out e-commerce generates $1.2 million every 30 seconds. Also, Alesia Krush uses a KISS metrics article to point out the stat that the average business can lose 25% of its online visitors if it takes more than four seconds for the site to load.
What this should show is that even a short outage can be devastating to a company – and especially to small business. There is too much money out there available to an e-commerce business, and a website or online crash can limit your access to that revenue, and can even drive it to your competitors.
Using a service that is designed to eliminate this problem, then, should vastly strengthen the generated revenue that the business available to you online. This is especially true if your website’s performance is tied to your office servers’ ability to connect at all times.
It encourages continuous communication.
It is important to be able to communicate with customers, vendors, employees, and many others at all times. This is especially true in today’s work environment where many employees can work virtually.
To manage those workers, conduct virtual meetings, webinars, or the like, and communicate with all the other people that keep a business running, outages have to be kept to a minimum.
It creates better customer service.
Another reason to ensure service goes uninterrupted is to create better customer service. When a customer has a problem, they do not want to wait for the business to fix technological problems before they get their answer, they want to get it as soon as the problem arises.
Through continuous always on coverage, businesses can receive and respond to customer inquiries as soon as possible. In this way, customers feel as if their complaints or suggestions were heard, not ignored.
It stops competitors from getting a leg up on the market.
If your website crashes, a customer looking to make a purchase may still do so – but from a company who have better Internet sevice. Avoiding outages not only protects your business, but it also prevents handing revenue to your competitors and keeps customers.
It eliminates stress.
Worrying about all the above points – i.e., losing money and communication, slowing down customer service, and giving competitors business – can be stressful. To eliminate said stress, it is important for a business to go with a service it can trust.
Using a reliable Internet provider and knowing that should something happen, a backup is in place, can mean that the business owner has one less thing to worry about. Peace of mind, in this case, can be priceless.
Some Final Thoughts
Internet outages can lose business’s potential sales, create a bad reputation and poor customer service, and causes stress. On top of that, it gives competitors a chance to nab those potential shares for themselves. Companies should do whatever they can to safeguard themselves from these calamities, and the best way to do this is to invest in an always-on service. For more information on the Always On Internet solutions from Allied, click here.
