All too often manufacturers and resellers use these terms to mean, simply, you are entitled to free patches and not much more. This is often known as software assurance, but rarely does it include hand holding when you need it most. Perhaps there is a toll-free help line, or maybe your contract includes up to 5 support tickets per year. If you have a qualified staff and a solid emergency plan, this may be all your business needs and you can save a few bucks. If not, you may be in trouble.
Ask yourself if software patches and email support will be enough to keep your business afloat? Managed services should go several steps further. A solid managed services plan should at least match and hopefully exceed coverage around your critical business hours. These days so many call centers or IVR systems are continuous operations that often 24/7 support is the only acceptable option.
In addition, does your vendor provide proactive health checks on the system? When was the last time something went wrong and you were blind-sided by that call from the contact center manager? Does your vendor have alerting tools in place? I’m not just referring to Solarwinds or general server tools, but are there truly any components in place customized for your solution that might save you from disaster?
Through our many years of experience designing custom solutions, MicroAutomation has likewise developed a collection of proactive and sophisticated monitoring tools. We use this tool set to provide continuous monitoring of the numerous integrations throughout a complete solution. In many cases, however, these tools do much more than simply alert an administrator. Some systems are nearly self-healing, and can correct problems faster and with less interruption than any human can.
The concept of managed services should go well beyond opening a ticket or waiting for a call back. If your business relies on your contact center solution to stay alive, ask yourself what might be the total cost of losing your most critical lifeline to your customers at the worst possible time.