Are your business AV system problems costing you sales? Imagine you’re on a conference call with a potential new client who is undecided about signing with your company. You’re about to convince them why it’s a perfect time to sign up, and then, the meeting feed cuts out and disconnects. You try quickly jumping on the phone to call your contact, and after what seems like an eternity, they reluctantly pick up the phone and tell you they aren’t interested at this time.
Maybe if the call hadn’t dropped, you could have closed the deal. But that meeting signal drop just lost you a big sale by giving the potential client time to let their doubt settle in unchecked.
Unfortunately, for many businesses, this scenario is all too real. Improper, outdated, or defunct audiovisual equipment can cost your company, as it will hurt the most important thing: the bottom line. Modern meetings and sales rely heavily on tech and the first impression it provides. That’s why it’s so crucial to ensure your AV system components are valuable assets and not sales-losing liabilities.
The High Cost of Downtime From AV System Problems
The scenario mentioned above is, unfortunately, much more prevalent in workplaces today. As companies take time to update, upgrade, or replace their AV systems with more modern components, their communications, meetings, and presentations suffer.
Modern Buyers Expect Flawless Tech
Today’s modern business professionals are used to working in fast-paced environments. As such, they are not strangers to our society’s instant gratification movement, which has led to greater expectations of how and when information is received. We all want answers now. We don’t want to wait to ‘boot up an old system’. That kind of yesteryear technology leaves a poor impression on almost everyone under the age of 60. Remember that the current generation of new adults never knew a life without a smartphone, so when they want answers or information, they expect it now, not later.
Corporations can lose sales or even existing business due to something like a network outage, or they may even default on a contract, resulting in financial losses.
The True Costs of AV Conferencing and Communications Systems Failure
According to Veeam’s 2019 Cloud Data Management Report, organizations experience unplanned downtime on average 5-10 times per year, with the average cost of one hour of downtime being $102,450. (Veeam, 2019)
If we assume a corporation or organization has five unplanned downtime events per year, that’s over half a million in losses in a single calendar year alone. Obviously, even laughably so, the right choice is preventive maintenance and a preemptive AV health check.
Aside from missing opportunities to impress potential clients, and also negating the fact that older systems are slow or provide lag when trying to operate at today’s communications standards, a bad AV system won’t just lose your potential clients, it will reveal to the world that your rely on equipment old enough to be older than those new adult generations we spoke of. Old equipment is not impressive to potential clients, just as a dodgy meeting connection is equally unimpressive.
The It Strain – When Your Team Has To Become AV Technicians
From our own experience, we don’t mind saying that when you’re panicking in the boardroom because the AV conferencing system isn’t working, dumping the headache on your IT team with mere moments to fix (no pressure there) is abhorrent when you could have pre-tested your communications to ensure all worked as it should before meeting time.
However, we understand that business moves fast, and you don’t always have time to inspect equipment, as it is typically a mere afterthought. It’s like when you’ve got a big sale coming in the door, you don’t necessarily worry about your pen working. However, when it’s time to sign and your pen won’t work, it’s not a fun situation, now is it?
When Your IT Team Becomes Your AV Team
Your IT team might be able to assess and repair or reconfigure your AV equipment to work for you, but what if it’s something beyond their scope? Perhaps their daily focus is on software integrations and internal networking systems, rather than pre-testing AV valuable equipment for meetings and collaboration. Putting excessive strain on your IT team could also cause them to miss something more crucial, like data security, which, let’s face it, is more important to your internal IT team than the quality of a conference call.
It may be time to consider having an AV professional perform a system test and AV health check to ensure that no member of the managerial team panics before a big meeting due to equipment malfunction. In doing so, you take the pressure off your IT team regarding communications and let them focus on ensuring that things like data and network security are prioritized, as they should be.
Digital Transformation Overload
IT professionals who face digital transformation initiatives often feel overwhelmed. In fact, 80% of digital transformation projects fail. The estimated cost of scaling back is USD 4.55 million. (Olmstead, Levi, 2023)
When it comes to audiovisual equipment, please don’t leave it for your IT team to handle on their own. Hire a professional AV technologist, such as the team at Century AV.
Signs You Need an AV Health Check
An AV Health Check is a service provided by Century AV for Canadian businesses to ensure their AV communications equipment is not only functioning properly but also configured appropriately to meet their system and organizational needs.
If your organization experiences frequent or infrequent AV system issues or system failures or if the equipment is known to malfunction, then it is definitely time to schedule an AV Health Check with Century AV.
How a Health Check Works
An AV Health Check service is relatively straightforward – a trained AV technologist will test all functions and features of your AV system to confirm both appropriate operation and optimal configuration. The technologist will also inspect and verify connections, cable routing, and condition, update firmware, and ensure proper connectivity and stable connections.
Ensuring your AV system works is crucial. Did you know that the average person has an attention span of between 2.8 and 8 seconds? (DST, 2023)
Now, imagine your sales team and potential clients have to wait 5-10 minutes while your IT team scrambles to figure out why your AV communication equipment is not working. To avoid this, we recommend signing up for our AV Health Check service.
How to Get Started
Luckily, scheduling an AV Health Check in Ontario is easy – reach out to Century AV to arrange your company’s AV Health Check. We’ll walk you through what we need to complete the audit on your behalf and give you an idea of what we will report to you, including how we will present our findings. Don’t wait for your system to fail. Book a health check today.
Article Sources
- To Contributors. 2004. “Duration of an Outage When a System Is Unavailable or Unable to Provide or Perform Its Primary Function.” Wikipedia.org. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. June 16, 2004. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtime?.
- Olmstead, Levi. 2023. “The Cost of Digital Transformation in 2025.” The Whatfix Blog | Drive Digital Adoption. May 2023. https://whatfix.com/blog/digital-transformation-cost/.
- “100 Proven ROI-Driven Digital Signage Statistics 2022.” 2023. Digital Signage Today. 2023. https://www.digitalsignagetoday.com/blogs/100-proven-roi-driven-digital-signage-statistics-2022/.
