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Efficient IT support requires a modern tech environment

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There was a time when the IT department was an obscure, poorly funded back office function in charge of things like rebooting printers. They even made a show about it!

However, the Internet turned out not to be a fad, and computer technology rapidly evolved from strange and expensive to mission critical and the key to scale.

The role of Information Technology evolved just as rapidly, catapulting those who know how to set up, configure, and maintain IT to the forefront of several organizations. Based on how tech keeps evolving, the role of IT only continues to gain importance.

IT Support teams typically deal with the maintenance part of the equation. They make sure your users and systems run smoothly. As more and more processes and business functions depend on technology, the bottom-line impact of an efficient IT Support team grows.

But if the underlying technology stack is not kept up to modern standards, IT Support teams can be put in a tough position. This problem is exponentially bigger for companies that deal with multiple sites, vendors, or partners.

IT  managing multiple systems

Common IT Support challenges in contact centers

A contact center is a good example of an organization with many interdependent systems. Large contact centers are especially complex, often dealing with multiple clients across a range of products, services, functions, and business units.

Specifically, we often see the following:

  • Multi-vendor dependencies and requirements limit IT’s ability to deploy upgrades. This is when you have a big, messy, tangled web of custom technologies across different vendors or sites. There are limited integrations, with only some systems “talking” to one another. A single upgrade or change of one thing can make the whole ecosystem stop working or come crashing down. Instead of upgrading, IT is forced to create more custom solutions, adding to the tangled web.
  • Terminology inconsistencies across vendor platforms cause execution slowdowns. If everyone uses a slightly different ‘language’ for IT communication, then time is wasted in translation or fixing miscommunications. Special programs may need to be created and then maintained to help automate or manage terminology, adding to cost and time.
  • Difficulty assigning responsibility for issues leads to burnout and blaming. The problems above are good examples of systemic problems. Any given issue is partly thanks to failures or inefficiencies that can’t be traced to exactly one faulty thing or negligent person. This leads to a diffusion of responsibility among both the IT Support team and possibly the actual end users of your system (including customers). Without any clear short-term solutions available, people can become demoralized. Culture suffers. Increasing amounts of frustrating, unsolvable tickets leads to burnout. Eventually, your IT support staff will want to seek work elsewhere (demand is strong for their skills).

An inefficient, frustrated, and demoralized IT Support team is a dangerous thing for any organizations seeking to thrive in this modern era. Asking a team to maintain a failing, outdated system is a surefire way to create this problem.

The solution, while often intimidating, is straightforward: invest in a modern tech stack. One that has the agility to stay relevant for years, and is built to seamlessly interface with other modern systems.

For contact centers, that means running operations on a secure, public cloud infrastructure.

At your fingertips with cloud

On-premise vs private cloud vs public cloud

On-premise means the technology is literally on site—physical servers in the building do the work. This is the oldest and riskiest system which many organizations still cling to. It is hard to upgrade, does not ‘talk’ to other systems easily or at all, and is full of inefficient and “dumb” programming that cannot be tweaked without specialist knowledge. In other words, it’s an IT Support nightmare.

Private cloud isn’t much better. The tech is not on site, but with no way to seamlessly connect to the outside world of third-party applications and systems, private cloud systems can fall behind as fast as on-prem platforms.

The modern solution is a secure, public cloud infrastructure. The risk and maintenance burden is spread over a large network of providers—helping the IT support team make efficient use of their time and resources.

GTS specializes in helping empathically migrate organizations to these secure, public cloud systems, which dramatically relieves the burden on your IT Support folks. Get in touch today!

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