The economic and business landscape is evolving rapidly, putting organisations under pressure to introduce new technologies into their environments, and at the same time efficiently “keep the lights on” and maintain existing servers, storage and networking.

Add to this innovations such as big data, cloud, internet of things, the edge, intelligent automation, containerisation and app modernisation, and the picture grows even more complex.

While these technologies can bring substantial benefits to the business, they do need a much higher level of expertise. Complexity in the environment translates into complexity within business processes, and with that, more potential challenges.

Learn more about Dell’s support offerings from Tarsus Distribution

Therefore, the more a business depends on technology, the more important it is to have the right IT support, says Chris Larkins, business unit manager of the enterprise segment at Tarsus, South Africa’s leading ICT distributor.

At the same time, Larkins says, a new generation of customer and worker is emerging that wants to be able to interact with companies and each other through a variety of channels. The use of tablets, smartphones and laptops has become ubiquitous in the workplace, compelling forward-thinking businesses to expand their range of support channels to serve customers in the way they choose.

A big part of this is the rise in Web-based tools as a means of consistently delivering the highest quality of service. “Customer service is evolving from multi-channel to agile,” Larkins says. “This means that what customers really want is the ability to start an interaction via one communication channel and finish it on another one. But to make this happen, stronger channel and organisational alignment is key, as this will allow customers to interact with an organisation in a manner that is both seamless and effective.”

He says Dell is at the forefront of this trend with its agile support offerings. “When designing its solutions, Dell first considered the source of demand. Customers, service providers and third-party partners all need support, yet have different requirements. Dell and its partners have the responsibility to act upon these disparate requirements to ensure they all have what they need.”

Similarly, Larkins says, customers want to be able to access support in the language of their choice, regardless of the channels they use, be it telephone, e-mail, Web or new channels that are coming to the fore such as live chat, mobile support applications, social media and bots. “It is also vital, once the customer has engaged with support, to further engage them via the right delivery method, whether from a service provider or channel partner, from self-service tools or support communities, or a combination of all of these.

Ultimately, customers want the flexibility to choose support based on how critical a specific system is and the complexity of the environment, a central point of accountability for all their hardware and software challenges, and experience across domains that goes beyond a single piece of hardware. “They also seek predictive, automated tools and innovative technologies as well as consistent experience irrespective of where they are located or what language they speak.

ProSupport

“Enter Dell’s ProSupport, which we can describe as proactive, predictive and reactive support for systems that look after business-critical applications and workloads, enabling clients to adopt complex technologies with confidence by having experts on hand when needed,” says Larkins.

This improves IT performance and stability via automated proactive and predictive recommendations, and at the same time maximises workload availability through automated support enabled by SupportAssist and Secure Remote Services, he says. “Users will also enjoy an assigned service account manager who knows their business, their environment and, most importantly, their specific needs.”

Having priority access to specialised support engineers enables faster issue diagnosis and resolution, guaranteeing minimum disruption to the business.

Over and above the resolution of any issues, customers using ProSupport can support new tools and solutions with the peace of mind that they are not disrupting the user. “It doesn’t matter whether they are adding new equipment to a data centre or migrating end users to a new-range laptop as it will happen seamlessly, with limited downtime.”

He says all this will happen quickly and correctly the first time. “Entities across the board are having to do more, with a lot less, IT leaders are mandated with making their technology investments as productive as possible, as rapidly as possible. Dell support offerings help with smart planning, flawless data migration and high-performance reliability, from the start.”

It doesn’t matter whether they are adding new equipment to a data centre or migrating end users to a new-range laptop as it will happen seamlessly

Another solution, ProDeploy enterprise suite from Dell, says Larkins, helps organisations in every industry quicken enterprise technology adoption with deployment services designed specifically for them. “Through the solution, experts will lead these deployments, from basic hardware and software installations all the way through to the planning and execution of more complex integrations.”

ProDeploy brings a single point of contact for project management to its users as well as installation and onsite system software configuration, and boasts 30 full days of post-deployment configuration help. “Another plus is 24×7 onsite installation, user setting and data migration, as well as system management, software imaging and configuration. This enables customers to get new systems and technologies up and running as rapidly as possible, and with no glitches.”

Larkins says this is because through the solution, organisations can take full advantage of Dell’s reference architectures and best practices that the technology giant has integrated into its planning and processes for years. “Both ProDeploy and ProSupport were designed to help organisations accelerate their transformations from the edge, all the way to the core, by enabling smart planning, seamless data migration, and 100% reliability.”

For more information on Dell’s agile support offerings and to partner with professionals who can guide you to a solution that allows for minimum disruption to your business when problems arise, reach out to Tarsus Distribution today.