We just announced the immediate availability of the eGain Cloud AlwaysOn, an industry-first offering of its kind in the customer engagement applications space. It slays the scheduled maintenance downtime dragon, raising the bar on availability and disaster recovery.

The Always-On Customer Age is already upon us. According to Pew Research, 77% of American adults go online daily with 26% being hyper-connected, saying they go online “almost constantly.” Moreover, customer expectations for availability, response, and resolution times keep increasing with 66% of millennial consumers, for example, expecting real-time resolution rather than have to wait for answers. This has elevated the need for always-on customer service. Much to the dismay of buyers, however, most—if not all—cloud application vendors bait clients with “high availability” and switch them with hidden downtime for scheduled maintenance with no transparency—no mention of even the phrase “service level” in MSAs, for example. In fact, many vendors do not even offer service credits for service level misses.

“Standard SLAs usually fall far short of the customer’s expectations. It is not unusual to see only an explicit service level for availability, and possibly scheduled downtime, but little else,” write Jo Liversidge and Dawn Hubbard in the Gartner research note, SaaS SLAs: Reduce Risk and Improve Service by Negotiating These Key Terms.

Downtime costs businesses a pretty “pound.” IDC estimates the average total cost of unplanned application downtime for Fortune 1000 companies at $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion per year. Here is the good news: eGain Cloud AlwaysOn changes all that. Read our press release for more information, and up the ante against your competitors with always-on customer service!