Make Maintenance Great Again: How to Add Value to Your Existing Mitel or Avaya Investment
You might think Avaya and Mitel maintenance contracts are boring, but they are actually pretty crucial in enabling you to transform your business. Once you implement a new solution, the work doesn’t just stop there, if anything it increases. There are integrations to complete with other new solutions and the next stages of short-term transformation roadmapping to be done.
Digital transformation is about the continual journey of improvement and a (very) good technology partner will always be looking for ways that they can add value to your existing investment. There are a lot of companies out there that aren’t getting the value they need from their existing Mitel or Avaya maintenance contracts for example.
We want to make maintenance great again by helping companies realise where their existing contract might be losing them money and explaining why a partner switch will help to add value to their Mitel or Avaya investment.
What’s a Maintenance Contract Again?
Maintenance contracts enable you to cut out the day-to-day management of your business IT. It essentially removes the burden of maintaining solutions from your in-house IT human resource, whilst also giving you full visibility and reporting functionalities. Maintenance contracts are pro workplace modernisation. They enable your IT staff to continue to work on more complex digital transformation projects that require more attention and are crucial in the evolution of the role of the IT manager. The IT manager used to be someone who genuinely did ‘just keep the lights on’ and manage day-to-day tasks, but now they are more business change focused and crucial in leading digital transformation alongside CTOs, CIOs and CDTOs.
With a partner managing your maintenance contract, it means that any issues with your systems are spotted and resolved with lightning-quick speed. Your partner should work with you to provide the latest insights into your Mitel or Avaya ecosystem and how you can improve it.
Some partners on the market will live up to the bare minimum requirements of their maintenance contracts, some don’t even offer maintenance in the first place! If you’re finding yourself in a position where you’re questioning if you’ve selected the right partner, you need to read on.
Ways Your Maintenance Contract is Losing You Money
Maintenance is not like insurance, you shouldn’t think, ‘well it’s better to have it than not’. You need to invest your money wisely, because if your maintenance package isn’t right for your business, then it will be losing you money, never mind adding value to your investment. Let’s face it, in order to embark on a successful digital transformation, you need maintenance. Otherwise your progress will be too slow and your resources will be spread too thinly with your teams working on the day-to-day stuff as well.
Here are the key ways we’ve seen maintenance contracts lose businesses money:
#1 it’s not tailored to your needs
A maintenance contract should be flexible. Since businesses are all individual, so are their maintenance needs. Depending on the amount of human resource you’ve got and the budget for your maintenance contract, your partner should consider the best options for coverage for you.
For example, you might want weekly reports as opposed to monthly, or a monthly meeting to discuss the next upgrade or integration of your other ongoing digital transformation projects into the Mitel or Avaya system. If you’re paying for something you don’t need or worse, if you’re paying for something but you’re not getting it from your maintenance contract then your contract is not tailored to your needs. You may as well throw that money down the drain.
#2 you’re not getting feedback from your partner
Whether it’s negative or positive, feedback helps you move forwards as a business and improve your existing systems. Your maintenance partner should provide you with in-depth reporting and feedback to review and consider. If something goes wrong, your maintenance contract ensures the matter is resolved quickly, then a good technology partner will work with you to walk through the steps they are taking to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
We often see companies that are not getting the feedback they need gain real value from a good maintenance provider. Then they wonder why issues are constantly reoccurring.
#3 the results you’re getting are reactive, not proactive
If you want to determine whether your partner is going to be a go-getter or not, a good place to start is to look at how proactive they are about your maintenance contract. The best technology partners will go above and beyond to continually improve your services with them. If your partner is only reactive then you’re losing money.
#4 engineers looking after your maintenance contract are rookies
If you don’t have the best people available looking after your maintenance contract, then the investment is wasted. The most informed Mitel and Avaya engineers will be able to resolve issues much quicker, recognise common issue causes through their extensive experience and ultimately be able to help your ecosystem grow in the best possible way.
It’s worth checking which accreditations the engineers looking after your maintenance contract have. Britannic’s expert engineers are accredited at the highest level in both Mitel and Avaya for systems and applications for example.
#5 the on-boarding system was a flop
The way a new partner on-boards your business for maintenance is crucial. When on-boarding, your partner should project manage and well document to mitigate the risk of change.
Drilling down to the level of detail you require is what a good partner will do. Working with you on crafting a maintenance contract that:
- Gives you digital clarity and mitigates risk
- Roadmaps digital transformation at a pace that suits your business
- Ensures your systems are healthy 24/7
If your on-boarding process is not smooth and thorough, it’s a good indication of what’s to come and could well mean you lose out both financially and from a business growth perspective.
Make Maintenance Great Again
If you can relate to the above 5 points, it’s time to find a partner that wants to up their game and offer you more. Maintenance should be more than ‘maintaining’, it should add value to your Mitel or Avaya investment and it’s a doorway to bigger projects.
Recently, we’ve helped a client of ours, a leader in the insurance market to implement a gamification solution into their contact centre. This continual progress has come off the back of a Mitel maintenance contract that we had with them. The business originally started with just utilising Britannic Technologies for their maintenance and gradually, through real partnership we have assisted them along their transformation journey at a speed they are comfortable with.
KM Group, now lliffe Media worked with Britannic to look after their mixed Mitel and Avaya estate and over time consolidated the eight separate systems into one cloud based managed service, making it much quicker and simpler to roll out updates and set up new sites. The acquiring organisation are now using the Britannic infrastructure as well.
“The secret of success is choosing the right partner, Britannic worked very hard in getting to understand our needs, setting up the infrastructure that was right for our business and implementing the changes with effective planning and liaison with all our teams. As a result the changeover was smooth and benefits have been readily identifiable.”
Duncan Gray, Operations Director, KM Group
The Cherry on top of the Cake: B●CONNECTED
We recognise that every aspect of your partnership with a technology company should add value. Maintenance contracts are an opportunity to help get a handle on your digital transformation journey and accelerate it (if you want it accelerated).
B●CONNECTED is our framework for workplace modernisation and digital transformation that can house your entire ecosystem. It can deliver your Avaya and Mitel systems from the cloud and overlay existing systems to enable you to modernise you old infrastructure by plugging in new applications.
The orchestration layer indicates how the B●CONNECTED framework breaks down and delivers your applications. Allowing you to work in, gamification, workflows, business process automation, AI and data flows across your contact centre and wider business.
Disrupt the status quo. Try us for your maintenance contract. What have you got to lose? Find out more.
