IT support doesn’t need a crystal ball to predict the future

Unexpected device issues, whether they come in the form of hard drive corruption, battery failure, or slowdowns due to age, are a significant blocker to productivity. They stop your users from doing their jobs as usual and pull IT teams away from more valuable tasks in order to handle reactive support requests and device management. 

Those impacts on productivity are further amplified when you consider that only 45% of tech issues even get reported to the IT team, with users choosing to simply either grin and bear most device issues or attempt a fix themselves.  

To overcome this roadblock to productivity, businesses need to find a way to move from reactive to proactive device support, remediating any issues before they can cause disruptions or downtime so users can continually make the most out of their devices. 

HP Proactive Insights - your IT support oracle

To pivot to proactive support, IT teams need the ability to predict the future – but how can they achieve that?  

Just like the Met Office predicts the weather by analysing data from all over the country, you can predict device issues by gathering data on critical device metrics like battery health, storage space, and utilisation. Fortunately, that’s just what HP TechPulse does – it’s a powerful analytics tool embedded on user devices that passively tracks thousands of data points. 

The next puzzle is how an IT team can actually interpret all that data – HP has you covered here too with Proactive Insights. The cornerstone of any TechPulse deployment, HP Proactive Insights aggregates data from TechPulse, analysing it to produce actionable device management insights. This avoids the need for individual users to report IT issues. Instead, Proactive Insights identifies devices that are at risk of failing and suggests solutions, so you can fix any issues ahead of time. 

Beyond extending your support capabilities, Proactive Insights also helps inform your device strategy by giving comprehensive reports on device performance – are one team’s devices going underutilised? Is another team constantly pushing against the limits of what their devices are capable of? These insights allow IT teams to adopt a more data-driven device strategy, able to match users to the right devices without needing to rely on anecdotal feedback and guesswork while ensuring upgrades are targeted to where they’ll have the largest impact. 

What’s more, TechPulse can be deployed on a huge range of operating systems, including Android and iOS. These insights will continue to feed into Proactive Insights, just like data gathered from desktop devices. This makes device management a breeze, as IT teams can monitor all user devices in their environment through a single pane of glass. 

Enabling user satisfaction and productivity

Just because Proactive Insights removes the need for IT teams to rely on user reports of IT issues, that doesn’t mean it sidelines valuable user input. In fact, Proactive Insights makes it easier than ever to understand user sentiment at scale using intuitive feedback collection, and factor that information into your device management so users continue to get a say in what devices they’re provisioned.  

Users also benefit from being able to focus more on their work, with the shift to proactive support resulting in fewer disruptions due to unexpected device issues and less time spent troubleshooting those issues with support staff. And, if you still need to get your Windows 11 migration in order, Proactive Insights can identify what devices will and won’t support the new OS. 

Organisation-wide security policies can also be tracked by Proactive Insights, allowing you to identify unsecured devices in your environment and take action to make sure they’re not opening your business up to elevated cyber risk. This also helps to keep your users safe, ensuring that they don’t assume a device is covered by your cyber defences when it isn’t. 

And, of course, moving to proactive support brings an indisputable productivity gain for the IT team, who can spend less time reactively responding to support tickets and more time focusing on projects that create value and advance the business. By identifying all devices in an environment experiencing particular issues, IT teams also gain the ability to handle support workflows in bulk, helping better optimise their time, and potentially unlocking discounts from ordering new equipment at scale. 

We’re not psychics, but we’re predicting a future where you’ll want to know more about how Proactive Insights can help you. To find out more, check out our informative datasheets on both Proactive Insights and TechPulse, or get in touch with the team today to discuss a 30-day free trial of the solution.