The past two years have been pretty eventful for the IT industry. With more businesses than ever choosing to work remotely and adopt technologies like the Cloud or remote device management, IT providers have seen a noticeable change in what’s demanded from them. In the following blog, we’ll extrapolate from today what the future of IT support could be.
More automation and machine learning
With current monitoring tools, many types of incidents can be logged and resolved automatically. This is being bolstered by technology like chatbots and detection tools that can help end-users resolve IT issues themselves. All of that can combine to provide IT support teams with extra bandwidth. The goal will be to have AI handle all the day-to-day firefighting and let the technician only work on bigger more important, bigger picture, higher ROI tasks.
More focus on cyber security
Thanks to the pandemic and the increase in remote work, the past two years have been a field day for cyber criminals. As more and more of our everyday work is digitised and shared online or to the Cloud – often within home work environments possessing below-par security – defences need to be more advanced than ever. This is why the industry is leaning towards pre-emptive cyber security. Similar to the above point on automation and machine learning, the aim will be to let technology detect and solve as many issues as possible, before they’ve had the chance to cause any trouble.
A more customer focused experience
Many IT support providers are offering the same services. How these services are delivered is the big differentiator between IT support providers. In fact, that’s an understatement; customer experience is everything. Because of this, some customers are rethinking the concept of an SLA. The XLA – experience level agreement – is on the table to take the SLA’s place. This is because all too often customers aren’t happy with their service and experience despite the SLA being met.
More virtual face to face support
2020 helped boost the trend of face-to-face video sales meetings. Pretty much anything that you might have typically done in person can now be done remotely. From the first meeting to support issues. Yes, there were plenty of support issues resolved remotely pre-pandemic. But now, thanks to better connections (namely 5G) and video conferencing software, the faster and more efficient resolutions offered by face-to-face support are just too good to resist.
These forthcoming changes won’t be relevant to every business. For some businesses, remote work won’t enter the conversation and a few businesses will have little use for cloud computing. But one thing is for certain; your IT will look significantly different in ten years. If you’re curious about the future of IT support and what kinds of investments are smart to make today, click below to book a meeting with one of our IT support experts.