Today's high standard for customer service often leads to alert fatigue in support teams – a condition where an overwhelming number of incoming tickets and notifications decrease responsiveness and increase the likelihood of errors. It happens when a technical support team is inundated with more tickets than they can resolve. Therefore, they come up with an informal secondary system for tracking issues or simply start ignoring certain support ticket types.

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Understanding the Root Cause of Alert Fatigue

When support tickets pour in by the minute, the number of customer concerns waiting to be resolved starts to pile up. As the volume builds, the ability to discern critical issues from a quick fix becomes more challenging. 

The primary issue is the sheer number of alerts, many of which are false alarms, making it increasingly likely for employees to become numb to the alerts and miss crucial notifications. When alerts are not properly organized, vetted, and addressed, the risk that your technical support team is letting real issues slip by increases dramatically. 

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The Cost of Alert Fatigue to Your Business 

The constant influx of notifications overwhelms agents, leading to decreased productivity, compromised service quality, and emotional exhaustion. Let’s look at each one of these in more detail:

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Decreased Productivity: 

Alert fatigue in a technical support team can significantly lower team productivity. Staff members waste time sorting through numerous false alarms, reducing the time available for actual issues affecting your device solutions. This inefficiency can cause teams to grow to unnecessarily large sizes to deal with the growing number of alerts.

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Compromised Service Quality: 

Due to the time required to sift through extensive backlogs of alerts, two key service quality issues arise: 1) critical problems often get overlooked, and 2) by the time an issue is detected, it has likely been impacting the solution for an extended period. For smart hardware companies, alert fatigue means longer downtimes for essential equipment like self-checkout kiosks, affecting customer experience and potentially causing revenue loss due to system unavailability.

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Emotional Exhaustion: 

Constantly dealing with a barrage of alerts can lead to emotional exhaustion among technical support staff who feel like they are constantly in fire-fighting mode and have no sight of relief. This exhaustion often affects their job satisfaction and contributes to higher rates of burnout. In the long term, this can lead to higher staff turnover, additional training costs, and a decline in the overall quality of technical support services due to loss of knowledge transfer.

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How Can RMM Software Reduce Alert Fatigue?

Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) software can help support centers mitigate the chaos of alert fatigue and focus on the most important alerts. Here are a few ways that these software tools can help your support team get back in control:

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Smart Alerting Logic

Robust RMM software enables users to set up custom Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that trigger alerts tailored to specific needs. These KPIs can be integrated with advanced alerting logic, such as "wait" or "consolidate" commands. This is particularly useful in situations where numerous alerts are generated by repetitive alarms or brief changes in status. By utilizing smart alerting logic in RMM software, support teams can customize notification settings, applying thresholds for error duration and limits on alert frequency. This approach significantly reduces the number of redundant or spammy alerts, ensuring teams receive only the most relevant notifications.

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Automated Self-Healing Workflows

Enterprise-grade RMMs, such as Canopy, provide workflow automation features that enable users to create custom self-healing workflows. These workflows are activated in real-time when issues are detected on devices, automatically implementing corrective actions for both hardware and software problems before they affect performance. This offers a dual advantage: 1) It reduces the influx of alerts by proactively identifying and resolving issues before they are reported by customers, and 2) It alleviates the routine resolution tasks from Level 1 and Level 2 support team members, utilizing straightforward automation logic to handle these tasks automatically. To learn more about common ways customers can leverage automation workflows in Canopy, click here. 

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Performance Analytics Dashboards

Many RMM systems, including Canopy, enable the setup of detailed analytics to monitor solution performance trends over time. This granular analysis aids in pinpointing specific areas for improvement in both hardware and software. Comprehensive insights into solution performance empower technical support and engineering teams to make data-driven decisions on areas to change to address the underlying causes of downtime, ultimately leading to a reduction in the number of issues encountered initially.

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Conclusion

Leveraging the right RMM software can be a magical solution that cuts out the noise and makes customer support more manageable. By streamlining routine tasks, RMM software boosts support team efficiency and throughput, allowing support teams to focus on more complex issues that require critical thinking. This swift response to critical problems leads to lower downtime and happier customers, a benefit for all parties involved. Additionally, managing a portion of your alert load with self-healing automations keeps your support teams fresh, preventing burnout and maintaining high service quality.

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Finding the right RMM software to meet your needs can be a complex process, but it can pay back big dividends to your business when done correctly. If your team is experiencing alert fatigue and is curious if Canopy may be able to help, reach out to our team, and we’ll do a free evaluation of your device solution and support infrastructure.

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Reach out to us at info@goCanopy.com with the subject line “Free Strategy Session” to schedule a call with one of our technical subject matter experts. During these sessions, we take an unbiased approach, focusing on better understanding your specific business or device system requirements to be able to provide the most relevant advice.