Is Your Outsourced Support Safeguarding Your Business Growth?
- Outsourced support can save your retail business time and money, but is your provider taking the most intelligent steps to support your business growth? Retail Strategy, Audit, Systems and Support specialist Open Plus Ltd details six areas that businesses should be scrutinising to ensure that they are getting the best service.
“Today's trading conditions are tough for retailers,” comments Steve Drew, Service Delivery Manager at Open Plus. “While ecommerce may seem like the goose laying golden eggs, the growth associated with online retail comes with rigorous technical demands, and these demands can quickly escalate into considerable time and expense.”
Yes, ecommerce is a major growth area in retail, and yes, the growth seen in the online arm of many of our high street names can be the exception to a somewhat less captivating picture. But in order to take advantage of the surge in online buying it is vital that your business has the right support in place.
Given the advantages of arranging the human support a business needs at a fraction of the cost of recruiting your own team, increasing numbers of businesses are outsourcing in order to optimise flexibility and scalability for planned growth.
Whether you have already outsourced support for your ecommerce business or are planning to do so in the near future, here are six important areas areas you need to ensure your support provider is taking care of.
1. Hosting: A well selected hosting company can save you time and money and allow your business to minimise costs and flex and grow. However, outsourced support services should add value to your business by managing this relationship by quickly creating new servers, closely monitoring and adjusting your capacity around traffic spikes, and cloning servers to minimise manual intervention. Ensure you that an outsourced support provider offers these services.
2. Monitoring: In an ideal world, your ecommerce store will be running smoothly 24/7, but in reality issues like high customer load, limited hard drive space and processing power can lead to downtime. The key is to be as prepared as possible so as to minimise such outages. Make sure that your outsourced support provides the service level to minimise downtime, for example delivering automated alerts and checks, providing good response time for issue management and scrutinising the overall health of your infrastructure.
3. Security: Hackers are a fact of life but your business and your servers need not be an easy target. Ensure that an outsourced support provider protects your infrastructure with steps like server hardening, regular security screening, vulnerability scanning and restricting access to public-facing servers.
4. Backup: We all have a story about a personal backup crisis, but on an enterprise scale this is just not acceptable. While something will inevitably go awry with your systems at some point, ensure that your outsourced support gives you peace of mind by developing a backup strategy which works with your business including the regular backup of servers and backing up databases on different servers and geographical locations.
5. Databases: When business moves as quickly as it does today, you need fast and efficient access to your data and good response times to meet the expectation of customers in the online environment. Ensure your outsourced support guides you through choosing the right database for your business, replicating databases across multiple servers and closely monitoring and fine tuning your database over time.
6. Compliance: PCI compliance should be a 'no-brainer' for your online business. Your support provider should help you to ensure that your ecommerce site is up-to-date in this respect, ensuring your platform is regularly checked for PCI compliance.
Outsourced Support from Open Plus: Outsourced support done properly is exactly the type of opportunity that can make ecommerce the fast growing industry it is. Whether you are already dealing with a support provider or facing the Beauty Parade, ensure that these issues are all satisfactorily addressed. If not, you need a different provider.
