A colleague and I were discussing a steadily rising demand on our service department the other day. With many still working from home and general delay in returning to the office, they didn’t understand the cause. After walking through the reasons that our customers are sharing with us, I realized that there may be many AV and IT managers who, in their efforts to fully support the remote work environment, are ignoring their office audiovisual systems. Here are a few great reasons that our current customers are stepping back into their service agreements now…
A hybrid work environment requires fully operational office systems…
When everyone was working from home, the failure of one system only affected one person. In a hybrid environment, with half the audience in a conference room, the failure of that system significantly delays or takes down the entire meeting. None of us have the time to hold meetings twice because of a poorly maintained AV system.
The timing is right for a January return to office…
With many companies extending their return-to-office date or remote-work option to January, there are still a couple months to get an initial service visit scheduled, troubleshoot any issues and replace any equipment that is inoperable or outdated. Waiting until November or December is too late because…
Extended lead times on audiovisual equipment…
Due to the pandemic, several key manufacturers of electronic parts and pieces are experiencing very long lead times. If you wait until the last minute to check the operation of your key conference rooms, it may take months to add new functionality or replace outdated or inoperable equipment. That’s months of degraded communication with customers and employees.
Post-pandemic video conferencing is different from Pre-pandemic…
Before the pandemic a lot of video conferencing equipment sat idle and depended on very specific video conferencing codecs for operation. With the hyper-accelerated use of Zoom, Teams, WebEx and other cloud-based applications, the equipment, layout, and quantity of video-ready conference rooms has changed considerably. Additionally, everyone is much more likely to have cameras on for every meeting.
Regular service and preventive maintenance is always a good idea…
Like any big investment that is critical for your business, servicing and maintaining the investment is the best way to optimize the return. Audiovisual systems are more critical now than ever before as you communicate with your customers, partners and employees in new and more flexible ways.
Whichever one or combination of reasons, none of us want to be in that awkward position of being called in to an important video conference meeting because our equipment isn’t working! In comparison to the lost productivity, the cost of a service agreement is very affordable. It’s also a great time to learn about new technologies for managing the health and use of your critical AV systems.
