If you were to tabulate all the downtime throughout the past year and determined its true impact on your organization’s bottom line, you would likely find it proved quite costly. Downtime costs more than a couple of hours’ worth of productivity. Downtime frustrates employees, clients, and business partners. It even damages brand integrity. Here’s a look from our IT support experts in Denver at how downtime affects business:
Reduced Productivity
If the system is down, employee productivity will dip. In some cases, employees require web access to work. In certain instances, employees are completely dependent on the web for work. If the server host is down, it is possible to lose an entire work day of productivity or possibly several days of productivity.
Downtime Opens the Door to Lawsuits
Downtime can really lead to a lawsuit. If downtime stops you from delivering on your end of a contract, you might be sued. Litigation has the potential to prove more costly than allying with our IT support experts in Denver to reduce downtime in the first place.
Customer Loss
Downtime that prevents customers from accessing data or executing a transaction will prove problematic in terms of retention. If customers can’t get what they want with a few clicks and keystrokes, you will likely lose them to a competitor in due time.
Downtime Nullifies Marketing Efforts
Reduce the threat of downtime, and you won’t have to worry about whether you made prudent use of your marketing dollars. An email campaign and/or a pay-per-click ad that appears for the right search engine keywords or key phrases is worth consideration. What matters is the execution. Downtime that leads to error messages will ultimately prove to sabotage your marketing efforts.
Damage to Your Brand
If a client or business partner has a bad experience with your company, they have the power to use social media to spread the word. All it takes is one angry customer to vent about a poor brand experience on a popular social media platform for the issue to go viral. If your website and system are functional at all times, customers will have that much less to complain about.
Downtime Leads to Additional Costs like Repair, Overtime, and Recovery
Downtime has the potential to lead to significant costs such as employee overtime. Consider the wasted time spent at work while the downtime occurred. Little work was completed during this time of waiting. Employees will have to work extra hours to get back on schedule.
There is also the cost of the repair itself. If your company does not have an onsite specialist, you will have to shell out for a tech expert to get the server back in service. If customers complain about the downtime, you might have to give them a price reduction, a coupon or another form of compensation.
If you need IT support in Denver, look no further than us at AccountabilIT. We have the solutions for your IT needs. We provide cloud computing, data security, IT support, and more. Contact us today to schedule an initial consultation.
