Over the last month, Australia’s largest telecommunications provider, Telstra, has come under fire because of three significant disruptions to their services. Although the incidents have been reported as coincidental, the company received negative feedback and complaints which aggregated together to form a negative brand image. When mistakes disrupt a whole country, one that is dependent on your services to run businesses, it is hard to rebound positively. This is exemplified in a significant loss in their share price the last month, dropping from $3.25 to $2.74 in two weeks. However, these disruptions should help shape the way every business deals with faults. If your business is reactive, significant operational faults will seem worse than your proactive competitors. There is an advantage in ensuring you are committing resources to proactive fault management. A quote from a communication manager that works to limit downtime for their clients best represents this issue, they wish to “solve customer problems before they even contact us”. This mentality, putting user satisfaction first, will help them generate more clients because they are focused on increasing user satisfaction. To start a change from a reactive to a proactive team requires resources committed to help shape an automation process. The upfront cost of developing these protocols can be high, but the ROI is seen shortly and is extrapolated over time. Essential information to start this can be found in the following webinars, conducted by Mark Henry:

Mark is a Senior Systems Engineer at Opmantek but has built his own  MSPs; his history has been driven by increasing user satisfaction, this will give you the foundation to start automating your troubles away. If your focus is to improve user satisfaction, growing your business will be more straightforward and catastrophic events will be limited.