3 Reasons Why You Need a Monitoring Solution for Your IT Network

3 Reasons Why You Need a Monitoring Solution for Your IT Network

by | Mar 31, 2021 | Cybersecurity, IT, Monitoring, Uncategorized

You may not think you need a monitoring solution for IT network, but you’d be wrong.

As a company, you are always looking to do your best for your clients and for your own employees, especially when it comes to working online. Clients may be trying to access your website or their own tools virtually, and your employees may be utilizing the company’s network to perform their tasks throughout the workday. One of the biggest issues that can bring all of that work to a grinding halt is an issue with your IT network.

No matter how big or small your business is, being able to monitor your IT network at all times to ensure a high-functioning and quality experience for all who are connecting to it is paramount. But, before diving into the reasons why you need a monitoring solution for your IT network, it helps to define what we mean by a monitoring solution.

For our definition, we take Cisco’s concise explanation that:

Network monitoring provides the information that network administrators need to determine, in real-time, whether a network is running optimally.

Here are our top 3 reasons why you need a monitoring solution for your IT network.

Reason #1: Improve Your Network Uptime

As we mentioned above, if your IT network were to have an issue or fail, it can bring all of your business to a grinding halt — something that no business wants to have to worry about.

A network monitoring solution can help put some of that stressful thinking to rest. Your monitoring solution can allow you to stay updated on the status of your network every minute of every day without you having to manually go in and check things yourself. You can set up notifications to be sent to your phone or email when your monitoring solution notices an irregularity or any kind of network failure.

Being able to get an immediate update on any issues allows you to act quickly to get things back up and running before a client notices or before a business begins grinding to a halt.

Reason #2: Diagnosing Issues Swiftly

Building off of the fact that your monitoring solution will be able to inform you about any issues as they occur, it also allows you to diagnose what the issue is and what caused it quickly. Without a monitoring solution, if you were to be informed about a network issue on your own, you would have to work through multiple troubleshooting sessions manually to diagnose and determine where the error is occurring.

This could lead to more downtime for your network as you meticulously do your best to find the cause of your issues, what clients it’s affecting, and how to remedy the situation.

Reason #3: Improve Network Security

Unfortunately, as more business is done online, there are more opportunities for hackers to steal your data, and the last thing that you want to happen to your business is a large data breach.

As helpsystems mentions:

By regularly monitoring traffic on critical devices, it’s easy to spot suspicious changes in inbound and outbound traffic. Having in-depth visibility into network activity helps you proactively identify malicious network activity and find holes to patch that could turn into larger security issues in the future.

Having a monitoring solution allows some more peace of mind as you will know all there is to know about your network at any given time.

Whether you are thinking about adding a monitoring solution to your IT network for the first time, or you are thinking about transitioning to a new network monitoring solution partner, this is a critical investment that you absolutely need for your business.

4 Reasons Your Business Needs Customer Personas

by | Mar 10, 2021 | Business Process, Customer Experience, Customer Personas, UX

If you’re not familiar with customer personas, you may be unaware of all the reasons your business needs customer personas. Customer personas are useful to many aspects of the business process, including selling, marketing, user experience, and customer experience. Below are four reasons why you should develop customer personas for your business if you haven’t done so already.

What Are Customer Personas?

Customer personas are profiles of individual customers that represent a key demographic of your customer base. They often include such information as:

  • Name
  • Age
  • Gender
  • Race
  • Brief Story
  • Needs
  • Frustrations

An Example Persona

Here’s an example persona for a route-planning app:

An example persona named Robbie, published to 4 Reasons Your Business Needs Customer Personas

Reasons Your Business Needs Customer Personas: #1 Selling

The first reason you need customer personas for your business is selling. Not all customers are alike. Each different type of customer you’re trying to attract has different needs, wants, and frustrations you can help solve. In order to understand how to sell your product or service to each individual you encounter, you need to be able to quickly analyze who they are and what makes them tick.

Consider asking your sales leads questions like the following:

  1. What is your biggest frustration as a [specific type of person]?
  2. What is your greatest need right now as a [specific type of person]?
  3. What solutions have you tried in the past to solve your [specific problem]?
  4. Tell me a story about your average day when you are doing [a specific task].

Questions like these can help you understand how to cater your product or service to different customers so that you learn how to serve each individual that comes your way. Once you get enough answers to these questions, you can then group the answers into different categories and develop unique personas.

Reasons Your Business Needs Customer Personas: #2 Marketing

Of course, in order to sell your product or service to a customer, you must first reach them. Similar to the selling process, marketing is all about reaching specific groups of individuals. Whether you’re marketing over Facebook or on a local radio station, you need to make sure that you’re reaching the types of people who match your customer personas.

This is where digital marketing really shines, of course, because on platforms like social media you can target ads directly to key demographics and behaviors. With traditional advertising, you get put in a single channel with a large audience, but there’s no guarantee potential customers will ever really engage with your ad.

Regardless: knowing the four or five specific types of people you’re trying to reach can mean the difference between a successful marketing campaign and a big waste of money.

Reasons Your Business Needs Customer Personas: #3 User Experience

Another reason to develop customer persons is user experience, or how easy it is for customers to engage with your key touchpoints as a business. Rather than having a website, mobile presence, social media presence, etc. that is designed for everybody, in other words, you should design these touchpoints for specific people: your customers!

Developing personas can help you design each touchpoint to appeal to the specific types of people you’re trying to reach. This process should start at the level of search engine optimization and should extend throughout the look, feel, and features of each touchpoint. The more you know about your customers and their wants, needs, and frustrations, the more you will be able to tailor your touchpoints to engage them.

Of course, nothing beats usability testing with live users for optimizing your touchpoints for specific types of customers!

Reasons Your Business Needs Customer Personas: #4 Customer Experience

Finally, customer personas can help you refine the entire customer experience. If you think your customer experience–meaning the entire process a customer goes through from the moment they first engage with your business to the moment you earn their loyalty as a repeat customer–should work the same for every person, you’re wrong! The modern customer experience is all about personalization, about making every individual feel like your customer experience was built just for them.

How do you achieve this? By tailoring all the touchpoints of your customer experience to each individual persona. Sometimes, yes, this means having different campaigns for different types of customers, but many times it means making sure that the landing page you just developed doesn’t alienate your main customer types!

Regardless: you should be considering every touchpoint in your customers’ journey from their perspective. Understanding what motivates a specific type of person to engage with your business is key to understanding how to earn their business, and hopefully their loyalty, for life.