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December 2008 Virtual Technician Newsletter.
Happy Holidays!
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| Circle the Wagons in 2009
VT Adds Thermal Monitoring
Remote Monitoring Subscribers as of 12/31/08 receive Thermal Monitors free. See below for a free way to check supported sensors.
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VT In The News |
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VT mentioned in Hospitality Technology Magazine for exceeding 5,000 POS systems being monitored
http://tiny.cc/EhroY
Andy Rill of Wireheadz says..
"Virtual Technician allows us to distinguish our service offering giving us an advantage over our competition. Operationally, we benefit from reduced call times, faster call resolution and ultimately proving a better service without having to add additional resources. Based on the current economic situation VT plays a major role in our plans for 2009." |
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Circle the Wagons in 2009 |
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 As 2008 draws to and end, you are probably thinking less about what happened and worried more about what is to come. Next year - 2009 is going to be a trying time for most businesses in any industry. The retail and hospitality industry are getting hit hard with rising prices and decreased consuming spending. In good times and bad you are competing for customers and their business. In good times you are competing for the new customers. In slow times you are competing to keep the customers you have. With fewer new customers on the market, you can bet that someone has their sights on some of your existing customers and is willing to offer them a sweetheart of a deal to come over to the other side. Your challenge is to continue to provide world-class levels of support services while at the same time trying to be profitable. According to a Harris Interactive Customer Experience Report, “price will always be important in a customer’s purchase decision, but outstanding service is the number one reason customers do business with a company”. A strategy for 2009 is to solidify the relationships you have with existing customers and offer them innovative solutions that help them with their business. In doing so, you hopefully will help keep them in business because keeping an existing customer is a whole lot less expensive than trying to replace one. Metrics to look at:
- Do you have “at risk” customers that might be leaving you? Is so, how can you keep them?
- Of your total customer’s sites – how many are on support contracts?
- Of your existing customers on support – can you increase your revenue generated from these customers by offering innovative new services?
- Can you increase your operational effectiveness (do more with less) of your Help Desk?
Your Help Desk support operations can be a way for you to both increase revenue and reduce expenses. An incremental revenue stream from a new service offering along with reduce cost of operations has a greater impact on your financials than just cutting costs. As referenced in the Harris Interactive report above, customers place value in services. They place value in services that will help them keep their business operating more efficiently and allow them to offer a better experience to their customers. Downtime is a cost no business can afford right now. Support calls are traditionally are broken down into three stages- problem identification, diagnostics and resolution. The Services and Support Professionals Association (SSPA) states that 82 percent of the cost of delivering support comes from resolving customer issues. This creates a strong case for providing your technicians with tools for better visibility into your client’s systems, access to more information and the ability to proactively address issues. Anything you can do to reduce time spent in this process will provide potential pay back in several ways:
- Reduced call length times and related 800# charges
- Increased first call resolution
- Increased value out of existing Help Desk staff and infrastructure
- Reduced costs associated with on-site support calls
- Increased customer satisfaction and loyalty
When your support staff can provide high-quality support services to customers in a cost-effective manner, your customers win, and you win as well. To sum up, it is time to put more focus on your customers than you ever have before. The reoccurring revenue opportunity they offer will be vital to your business in the coming year. |
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Virtual Technician Adds Thermal Monitoring
Vigilix TSM and SSVT are excited to announce that thermal monitoring is available for both back office systems and workstation/terminals. Vigilix customers report that knowing about overheating systems early provides tremendous cost savings by allowing them to perform scheduled preventative maintenance rather than having to replace a down system.
Enabling thermal monitoring is as simple as one click on any Vigilix remote agent. The agent will detect all thermal sensors available on the system and will begin the monitoring process. Over the first twenty-four hours, the Vigilix thermal monitoring learns what the normal operating temperatures are for the system. After the first twenty-four hours, the Vigilix agent will report when the temperatures go above acceptable normal temperatures for more than an acceptable period of time.
Vigilix recently introduced terminal agent pricing to deliver a lower per agent cost for monitoring of terminals compared to the more extensive monitoring on backoffice systems. With the addition of thermal monitoring to terminals, Vigilix has greatly enhanced the benefits of monitoring individual terminals.
Benefits:
- Prevent hardware related failures
- Access to better hardware information
- Reduce travel time and costs associated with hardware failures
- Reduce support call times and 800# charges
- Better customer support and retention
Remote Monitoring subscribers as of December 31, 2008 receive free access to Therminal Monitoring templates.
To activate call 866-576-2839 x 24
For more details:
http://www.vigilix.com/news_events/VigilixAddsTemperatureMonitoring.htm
Check you hardware for Support Sensors: http://www.vigilix.com/SensorList.aspx |
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