Do you want your company to go through this pain?
Target, a second-largest discount retailer in the United States, paid $19 million to banks issuing MasterCard for breaching the data of 40 million card account holders and affecting up to 70 million customers.
Attackers took away the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of the card holders. To add insult to injury, up to three million sets of card detailers were believed to sold in the black market for fraud activities.
If you think big companies go through this nightmare, have a look at this shocking data:
Information Security Breaches Survey revealed that 90 % of large organizations reported information security breach issues while 70 % of small and medium-sized businesses reported the same issue.
Though companies with more than 500 employees face an average cost of the most severe breach between £ 1.46 million and £3.14 million, small businesses also face a major blow ranging between £75,000 and £310,800.
Most of the small business owners don't take any precautionary steps because they think hackers target only businesses with a large number of employees and profitable annual sales reports.
They are completely wrong.
Hackers are hungry for customer data. It becomes easy for them to hack the system of small businesses because they have lower defense mechanisms than big organizations.
Companies underestimate the cost of not preparing. They don't understand the depth of IT failures. As a result, they are unwilling to invest their money on recovering from technical disasters.
In a survey of 200 companies across North America and Europe, small enterprises lost more than $55,000 revenue due to IT failures each year.
According to IBM Global Services report, the average revenue cost of an unplanned application outage was estimated to be near $2.8 million dollars per hour.
The industry average cost per minute of network downtime was $5600 in 2010. In 2013, there was 41 percent increase resulting in a damage of $7900 per minute.
In 2010, the average cost of recovery time of 119 minutes was $680,700. In 2013, there was a steep jump of 32.4% in this cost by making an average loss of $901,500.
When businesses move from a startup phase to a big company, it becomes crucial to answer this important question:
What steps must be taken to provide continuous technical support to clients?
Businesses end up doing one of the following steps:
- Outsource the IT support
To focus more on the core activities, most of the companies look out for third-party IT support company to fix any virus attack, speed up problem resolutions, reduce downtime issues to name a few.
When selecting a partner for outsourcing it's important to review that they have policy and process based IT security management systems and comply with Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS) if they are handling the payment data.
Outside IT firms come with several benefits by providing tremendous value to businesses in achieving their strategic objectives, but these firms must be sufficiently resourced and well managed.
Many entrepreneurs spend too much time and money in hiring an IT support team. In the end, the team doesn't come up to their expectations.
Three main strategies for hiring a productive tech support team:
Hire a Well Balanced Team
Hire a team with a sound technical background and supportive nature. Having a team focusing solely on software installations, backup recovery and cyber security won't work in the long run. They must also have support skills to tackle the customer complaints with ease.
What's the use of technology experts when they are unable to convey the information to your customers?
Your IT team must solve your customer's problem by decoding the technical information in layman's terms.
More than your product, customers remember a company for their after sales services. A simple and quick solution instantly develops trust in consumer's mind.
Understand the process of handling of Tech support request
Your technical help desk team has to be orderly, efficient and relatively fast. Understand their structure and workflow keeping your end users in mind.
A single misstep can lead to loss of two important things:
Customers
Revenue
Ask them:
What steps do you take for improving client operations?
A valuable support team always tracks the operations to measure their improvement rate. It helps in filling the missing gaps to strengthen the bond with the customers.
Understand their Strategy During Critical Situation
Before hiring, conduct a test with the IT team members by replicating the crisis. Analyze their activities during the mock phone interview.
Ask this important question:
How they make your customer feel during a crisis?
When a service is down, a good support team keeps their cool under pressure. Instead of ignoring the harsh responses from frustrated customers and delaying the process by transferring the calls, they must empathize with the customer's issues.
The team must have the confidence to face the situation.
In the end, hiring process boils down to one important criterion:
Just hire a technical team which makes your customers happy.