Many businesses view unexpected downtime simply as lost opportunities to build revenue. Unfortunately, that undervalues downtime by a considerable degree. The reason why downtime-related damage is often overlooked is that businesses believe that it’s restricted to the outage period itself.
But really, that’s just the starting point. As we’ll see in this blog, unexpected downtime can bring with it much more extensive damage than is initially thought. For this reason, it’s recommended that businesses take a proactive approach to minimizing the risk by working with IT experts and making sure that they have replacement parts in stock to quickly address any issues.
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It Can Lose Customers — Permanently
You’d like to think that your customers will be with you through thick and thin, but there’s an upper limit to how much customers are willing to tolerate. One study found that customers will, on average, abandon a brand if they have three bad experiences, and there’s no doubt that an outage can be classified as a bad experience.
Most customers won’t call you up to complain about their experience; they’ll just move to a competitor. At that point, you’ve lost their revenue, and you’ve acquired the cost of replacing them. That’s a double whammy that can provide a real hit to profit margins.
Employees Are Still Getting Paid
The labor costs incurred during unexpected downtime are oddly rarely mentioned, but they can be significant. Your employees will still be getting paid during the downtime, yet they’ll be unable to produce any value (or at least as much value as normal).
In addition, there are usually other labor-related costs, too, such as having to pay overtime for IT teams and occupying executive time, which takes them away from doing the other value-adding tasks for which they receive their large salaries.
It Can Cost a Lot To Get Urgent Replacement Parts
In some cases, you won’t be able to get your systems back online until a vital replacement part is in place.
The cost of urgently acquiring those replacement parts can be brutal, in some cases as much as five times as much as what they’d usually cost. For this reason, it’s best to keep a spare parts inventory for all critical pieces. Working with the best wholesale supplier for computer & server parts, such as LA Sysco Technologies LLC, can ensure that you have the SSD, HDD, RAM, NIC, CPU, Switch, Motherboard, and SD cards in stock when you need them, at a cost that’s significantly cheaper than buying them urgently. Indeed, buying at wholesale prices is a lot cheaper than buying at the retail level, too.
It Affects Productivity After It’s Resolved
One of the critical mistakes that businesses make is assuming that as soon as they’re back online, everything is back to normal. That’s rarely the case. Unexpected downtime causes backlogs of work, customer support issues, and other tasks that have piled up during the outage. All the while those issues are being managed, the business can’t move forward. For this and the other reasons mentioned above, it’s vital that businesses work to minimize the risk of downtime as much as they can.
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