A study in 2016 found that companies in North America lose up to $700 billion every year due to IT outages – which includes a 78 per cent reduction in productivity.
When your network is down, you’re essentially paying your employees to be idle and you aren’t able to serve your clients and make money. You may be out of pocket even more if you need to pay overtime to staff once the network is restored so they can catch up on lost work.
The longer the network is down, the worse it gets. And you will also have to deal with additional damage sustained to your organization’s reputation.
Systems can go down for a number of reasons. This includes planned maintenance, software faults, cyber attacks, power outages, viruses, hardware failures, internet service provider issues and so on.
How long your system will be down for could be an hour, could be many days, depending on the complexities of the issue.
You should treat a network outage extremely seriously – particularly if an outage is prolonged or if outages happen frequently. Having a plan in place will help you to get through the ordeal.
A great tool to help you is DeskAlerts. This software is a powerful internal communications solution that enables you to communicate quickly with your employees.
With DeskAlerts you can quickly and easily send information to your staff in the form of a pop-up window that can’t be skipped, missed or ignored. You can send messages to the entire organization, or if the information you have is only relevant to a niche group, you can send targeted information to the appropriate users.
When you are recovering from a network outage, DeskAlerts will help you to:
Keep your staff informed
Not only do you need to alert staff to an issue as soon as possible, you should keep them updated throughout the process. Let them know the estimated time of restoration and provide advice on any known work-arounds.
If your systems have been restored after a period of time that has caused problems with clients or corporate reputation, it’s essential that you communicate your recovery efforts to your staff going forward so everyone is on the same page.
Take pressure off your help desk
When outages occur that affect all staff, you helpdesk staff will experience a higher volume of calls, all pretty much asking the same thing. When you use DeskAlerts to send notifications to staff, these questions are answered before they even get the chance to call – freeing up your help desk staff to find solutions.
Send targeted information
If you work across different office locations, for example in different cities or countries, an outage might be localized to just one city, state or country.
You can target your messages to the relevant users advising them of an estimated restoration time and offering solutions. For the rest of your company, you can let them know that staff in a particular location are experiencing problems and may not be available to assist them for the time being.