Common Outlook 365 Issues That Impact Profitability

How can small business financial leaders minimize profitability loss when email service is interrupted?

The great pandemic of 2020 caused most businesses to change the way they do business. Millions of workers migrated from office settings to remote work from home environments. Companies reacted by replacing premise-based email servers with cloud-based Outlook accounts on Microsoft 365. The move to remote work caused business leaders to re-calculate their sales projections and budgets to reflect the new reality.

In October, Microsoft 365 crashed twice in a few weeks, leaving over 200 million users without email service for many hours at a time. These outages can severely impact the bottom line if solutions are not put in place to prevent downtime and lost productivity.

Email is Still the King of Business Communications

Despite the growth of SMS, Slack, and social media channels, email remains a primary channel for business communications. Every business department uses email and it is critical for sales, marketing, human resources, and customer service. When a cloud-based server crashes, productivity for the business suffers in several ways:

Reduced Sales Output

Sales professionals depend on email as one of their primary communications channels. While many salespeople use telephones for prospecting, email is the channel used for closing the deal once a prospect is identified. Salespeople use emails to send proposals, negotiate terms and finalize contracts. Disrupting this stream of communications, even for a few hours, can impact revenue growth.

Disrupted Internal Communications

Internal company communications depends on reliable email service. From human resources to accounting, email connects employees working around the world. Email service disruptions reduce employee productivity by putting essential tasks on hold. If your business provides time-sensitive services, lost time can have a significant impact on profits.

Reduced Customer Support Response

Having an email disruption can have a critical impact on customer service and support. Poor customer experiences can damage relationships and make it difficult to renew contracts or secure additional business.

Common Outlook 365 Issues

Despite high profile outages, Microsoft cloud services are extremely dependable with a guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.9%. When there are issues, most can be handled internally and with support of a qualified managed IT services provider. We’ve listed some typical Outlook for Office 365 issues that might affect remote worker productivity.

Office 365 Service Issues

  • Outlook hangs up or crashes when trying to use it
  • Connectivity with mailbox
  • Outlook can’t set up a new profile
  • Unable to access a shared mailbox

Advantages of Working with a Managed IT Service Provider

For a small, working with an IT managed service provider can provide support and help you manage Office 365 support issues. Virtual help desk services support your users in case they have issues with Outlook, Microsoft Teams and other cloud-based applications. In addition, the managed IT advisor acts as your virtual CIO helping your organization plan IT acquisitions, secure your network, provide contingency planning, and manage your technology assets.