Unplanned Downtime: What Happens When Your Business Goes Offline?
Unplanned downtime can be a business killer. The most irritating thing about it? You never quite see it coming.
Planned downtime is something you can prepare for, control, and mitigate. It’s something you can use to your own advantage, to make sure unplanned downtime doesn’t strike in the future.
But even when you’re as careful as possible, downtime can come out of nowhere due to a network fault, frayed wire, or user error. And when these things occur, you need to know what you’re in for.
Your Traffic Stops
It doesn’t just slow to a crawl. It stops completely. No one can get onto your website, where your one and only checkout exists.
So, while customers are still searching your name, reading reviews and getting recommendations, and scrolling through listicles where your brand is named and linked, no one can actually get online.
And if they can’t get online, all of these interested, qualified prospects will still lead to dead ends anyway.
Your Communication Halts
Need to send off a few emails? You can’t – the internet is down.
Need to message the work group chat to see who’s available right now? Your messages just aren’t being received.
Need to quickly call a client to make sure they know about the mess you’re dealing with right now? You might just have landed yourself in a signal dead-zone.
When your business goes offline, your communication does too.
You’ll need to try and connect up to another wifi source ASAP. But even then, there’s a chance the only other internet connections around you are unsecured public wifi routers for coffee shop customers! You do not want to pass sensitive details across signals like these.
You Simply Won’t Know
And that’s the main issue, really. When your business goes offline, and you’re dealing with unplanned downtime, you’re out of the loop.
Who knows how much traffic you’ve really lost? Or how many sales you could have made, but weren’t able to?
It’s something you’ll have to wonder over forever, as there’s no way to really know what downtime has done to your business.
What Can You Do About Downtime?
- Be proactive: Like we said earlier, you need to prepare for unplanned downtime by occasionally willfully taking your website, network, and other IT connections offline for maintenance and repair. Work with specialists in managed device repair for businesses to get this done quickly, efficiently, and to the right high standard.
- Communicate with your customers: There’s nothing you can do about the effects of downtime except explain and apologize. As such, make sure your customers are kept in the loop about why your website was unavailable, if their data was at risk, and what you’re doing to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
When you’re dealing with unplanned downtime, the world goes dark and quiet. You lose time online, but you could lose money too. So get ahead of downtime problems, and stay online with some better IT habits within your business.
