Today’s businesses are more digitally connected than ever before, meaning that businesses are also more reliant on technology. IT has become a fundamental requirement for any business wishing to stay connected, manage processes and engage with their customers. Recent events have also put into perspective the critical role of technology in enabling businesses to have the agility to respond to rapidly changing situations.
Whether you are a CEO, CTO, IT manager or similar, the chances are that you know all too well the impact that inefficient technology can have on business continuity, productivity, and ultimately, the bottom line. Studies have shown that IT downtime can cost businesses $1.55 million annually, while the average employee loses around 30 minutes of productivity per week due to the same difficulties. This can equate to between 22 and 25 hours of outage over the course of a year. With the increasing importance of IT, and the central role played by IT in connecting organisations, it is easy to comprehend how the disruption and costs of an outage can quickly escalate.
At Lenovo, we understand that ensuring business continuity can be a real challenge. Running a 24-7 operation requires technology you can trust, backed up with the highest levels of support and technical expertise. Lenovo strives to provide businesses with the most robust solutions, developed to the toughest industry standards. Moreover, we recognise that our role in enabling you to keep your business running, goes well beyond the point of transaction. Our advanced support services are a vital component in helping IT managers to keep the lights on, and we recognise that good support goes beyond ensuring uptime, and can actually become a strategic advantage.
We’ve listened to our customers, and based on demands of today’s digital businesses, we have created Lenovo Premier Support, which helps to ensure business continuity and aid digitisation agendas. Premier Support is an optional service which provides three main elements to businesses – the Premier Support Center, Technical Account Managers, and Priority Service Delivery.
Premier Support Center
Technical support and assistance need to be available to your IT teams around the clock and on demand. The Premier Support Center offers advanced technical support, 24/7, 365 days a year. We’ve listened to our customers, and we understand their frustration and limitations of generic, script-based technical support offered over the phone. To address this, while employees are trained to consistently high standards, the support we offer is completely unscripted. Our staff are highly skilled, and trained to listen. In addition to hardware and OEM software support, each business is provided with a dedicated phone number and a single point of contact for case and escalation management.
Technical Account Managers
In the same way that we understand the need for engaged remote support, we also recognise that for Lenovo Premier Support to deliver a truly valuable service, we need to develop good working relations with our customers and their staff. This is why we assign a specific Technical Account Manager to each customer, who acts as an extension of the team. Beyond being the go-to contact for a business, Technical Account Managers are also tasked with evaluating processes and considering personalised recommendations to help meet specific needs. We’ve also implemented robust reporting and account reviews, so that the conversation between Lenovo and each organisation is always transparent, and priorities are agreed upon periodically, changed as and when necessary.
Priority Service Delivery
Lenovo also understands that when a business is facing an outage, there is no room for unnecessary delays. To that end, our Premier Support customers are placed at the top of the queue for service requests to reduce time to resolution to an absolute minimum. Where required, in most cases, we can also deploy our experts to provide next-business-day onsite labor and address warranty claims via parts prioritisation. Businesses opting for Lenovo Premier Support can operate in greater peace-of-mind, in the knowledge that should an issue arise, it can be quickly remedied.
To ensure that our advanced support services fit the needs of the busines, all of our offerings can be tailored for each customer. This ensures that while IT downtime will always be a potential issue, Lenovo works with companies to address their most business critical concerns, and gives the IT leader a greater degree of control and confidence in tackling any issues that do arise. By taking a proactive approach to support, and ensuring the right services are in place, businesses can anticipate challenges and address them much more efficiently. This proves far more effective than being reactive to situations and having to tackle issues at the last minute.
As our customers have come to realise, effective support provides benefits that go beyond just troubleshooting and fixes. By close alignment of the resources provided by Lenovo, our customers are able to utilise Premier Support to speed up the deployment of new systems, optimise hardware to run the most popular business applications, and shift the load of routine support onto our staff, saving their IT personnel for more strategic tasks.
My advice to any organisation considering how best to ensure business continuity is to evaluate your current systems, devices, and processes. Never be complacent – always ensure that you are evolving your technology to meet changing demands of the industry, the needs of your employees and the requirements of your end customers. Above all, recognise that IT does not have to be a complicated overhead for a business, rather it can be a strategic enabler. Think of all that IT has the potential to make possible and recognise that there are solutions out there to help you manage your technology and keep business on track.
