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As the world is drifting through the time of COVID-19, business survival and sustenance has become a topic of concern for entrepreneurs around the globe. Business owners are adapting technological tools to ensure the safety of their employees, expedite information distribution, and maintain supply chain among other business operations.

Following are some examples of how technology plays a role in business survival during COVID-19:

• Facilitating Remote Services: Technologies such as VPN (Virtual Private Network), collaboration tools, cloud conferencing, video calling, etc. have facilitated businesses to encourage and manage remote services. Employees can easily work on projects from their home to continue smooth business operations. Project management tools allow businesses to work on team projects in a seamless environment.

• Ensuring Employee Health: For businesses, who are resuming operations at their physical location, employee health is a major concern. However, technology advancements such as full-body scanners and thermal imaging systems allow businesses to detect abnormal body temperatures to identify individuals with probable infection. This allows customer and employee screening for reducing the chances of spread of infection.

• Online Learning: Businesses involved in learning (educational as well as vocational) are taking advantage of technology for providing online learning experience. Conferencing tools such as Microsoft Teams, have built dedicated online learning platforms.

• Enabling Contactless Movements: Supply chain is an integral part of any business. It is required to procure raw materials or deliver tangible products/services to the customers. However, the fear of infection is highly prevalent during COVID-19. In this scenario, technology has facilitated contactless movements. It has helped in managing delivery channels as well as easy movement of employees. Self-driven vehicles, online payments, and digital wallets have helped in creating a contactless delivery ecosystem.

• Reaching New Customers: Building a customer base is the foundation of business survival. Digital marketing plays an important role in allowing businesses to reach out to new customers in a time where physical marketing is not possible. Creating relevant digital content and sharing it on digital platforms help businesses in conveying information about their products/services to a wide consumer base.

• Customer Service Responsibilities: Amid COVID-19, consumers have large number of queries related to business operations, revised policies, delivery options, payment modes, etc. Chatbots are helping businesses in providing automated responses to these queries. This allows businesses to manage the high flow of queries in an efficient manner. Some tools allow businesses to adopt an integrated approach where a human agent can step in, if a consumer needs special attention.

For more information on role of technology in business survival during COVID-19, call Centex Technologies at (972) 375 - 9654.          

The trend of work from home has gained momentum in the time of pandemic. A large number of employees are now working remotely due to COVID-19. The businesses that have remote employees require making important changes for the transition. Amongst other changes, the businesses are required to make some technological additions to help their employees in working efficiently from remote location.

Following is the list of important tools and programs the businesses need to assist the remote workers:

• Hardware: Hardware is the most basic requirement when facilitating remote working environment. It is an essential starting point for remote workspace, including a working desktop, laptop or computer. Once a computer system is setup, the next requirement is reliable WiFi and a smartphone. Depending upon the job requirements, some additional hardware may be required such as printer, scanner, a landline phone.

• Document Creation & Editing Tools: The remote employees may be required to create and edit documents, notes and presentations. Thus, businesses need document creation & editing tool packages. These tools are necessary for every approximately every office job. A common example of such tool package is Microsoft Office 365. The package includes Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint. Other features that can be helpful for the remote workers include Microsoft Teams. This feature enables the remote workers to collaborate with their coworkers through messages, live editing, file sharing, chats, etc.

• Project Management Tools: Project management tools help in keeping track of the projects remotely. The tools aide the remote employees and teams to effectively organize work and manage projects & tasks. Different types of project management tools include desktop tools, web-based tools, mobile tools, personal tools, single user tools, collaborative tools and visual tools.

• Cloud Computing: Cloud computing helps in recreating the work environment in a virtual space, offering storage, application management, data analysis, security, support, etc. The solutions are scalable to allow businesses to add resources and services that can be easily accessible to remote employees.

• Video Conferencing & Chat Platforms: In order to manage the projects efficiently, it is important to maintain the communication between remote employees. Video conferencing and chat platforms allow remote employees to send direct messages to individuals and groups. These platforms also allow remote workers to send and share documents.

• Cybersecurity Tools: In a remote work environment, it is highly important to secure the business data being shared across the network. Cybersecurity tools help in ensuring the privacy of the business data and network. These tools also help in preventing the cyber criminals from accessing the private network.

For more information on technology requirements of businesses having remote workers, call Centex Technologies at (972) 375 - 9654.              

IT management is the discipline of monitoring and administering the information technology systems of an organization including the hardware, software, and networks. The main focus of IT management is to find a way to make information systems more efficient and facilitate business growth. Thus, improving IT management can lead to a successful business.

Here is a four-step approach to improving IT management:

Level 1 (Re-Master The Basic Troubleshooting): If an organization is facing problems such as-

• IT support is overloaded
• IT service outages are not resolved timely
• Growing ticket backlog
• Long downtimes disrupting business workflows
• End users are not happy with IT

Level 1 approach is essential for such organizations. The motive is to analyze current troubleshooting practices and makes them more effective. The organization needs to make use of thorough diagnostics, IT support knowledge sharing, and IT infrastructure tracking. The end result involves redesigning the IT processes, redefining IT guidelines, and adjusting the processes to fit the needs.

Level 2 (Prevent IT Failures): Level 2 approach suits the organizations facing issues such as-

• Troubleshooting is fine but IT service availability can’t be improved
• Increasing number of incoming IT tickets
• Growing costs incurred on resolving IT issues
• IT support agents have to spend much time on manual data entry in the ticketing tool

Level 2 approach facilitates preventive IT service management, tracking events/changes in IT infrastructure, managing available IT assets, and automating IT support tasks. It focuses on rooting out the cause of similar incidents and automatic reporting of abnormalities in IT infrastructure to free the IT support for resolution tasks. Proper visibility of IT assets enables timely and efficient distribution among end-users resulting in increased IT service availability. This reduces the IT/business disruption and the costs involved.

Level 3 (Improving IT Services): Level 3 approach is suitable for businesses that extensively depend upon IT to execute business processes. Also, it is the suited solution if the business organization faces any of the following problems-

• No set guidelines for reviewing & improving IT services
• IT costs are very high
• IT service agents can’t conform to strict SLAs

Level 3 focuses on timely updating IT services in order to keep them relevant. It also suggests making use of automation and machine learning for improving IT service management accuracy & productivity.

Level 4 (Merging IT & Corporate Strategies): In a dynamic business environment, it is important to synchronize IT & business strategies for uninterrupted growth. This will facilitate the quick introduction of new IT services whenever a business change occurs.

For more information on a stepwise approach to improving IT management for businesses, call Centex Technologies at (972) 375 - 9654.