Support

South West Communications Group operates an industry-leading support infrastructure that provides our clients with a professional, highly responsive facility to address all areas of day-to-day fault rectification and maintenance. This is underpinned by nearly three decades of experience and facilitated by an extensive team of highly trained engineering and technical support staff specifically designated to support our client base.

Our team of strategically-based field engineers and remote engineering team allow the delivery of a range of support packages to organisations that require fast response times and total cover options. Our engineering support headcount and geographical location is commensurate with the number of clients that we support in a particular region and the agreed service level agreements that are in place to ensure that we meet and exceed our contractual responsibilities and commitments.

Responsibility - South West Communications Group takes total responsibility for maintaining and supporting equipment installed at customers’ sites and our support management procedures includes:

Part of support management procedure includes a defined practice that ensures our customers have a clear understanding of the fault logging process while also endeavouring to keep them informed of every stage of our methodical and efficient reporting, escalation and correction system.

Fault logging, correction, reporting and escalation - In the event of a fault occurring, you would contact our help desk manned by front office staff specifically trained to process fault calls and to allocate engineering resource. The help desk will log each call received, log the caller’s name and location, and will confirm the call incident time and fault priority with each caller. At that point in time, the caller will be given a unique fault log number and advised of the agreed fault log time. It is at this time that all response times for on and off-site work will be measured and reported against.

Regardless of the type of support contract, we will undertake a remote diagnostics session within one hour which allows the same comprehensive diagnostics and remedial action to be undertaken remotely as can be undertaken directly on the system. This reduces delays in getting field-based engineers to site and ensures expert diagnosis personnel are always on hand. We consistently achieve greater than 70% of fault rectifications via remote diagnostics.

If we are unable to fix remotely, a field engineer will attend site within for hours for a major fault (affecting more than 20% of your system) and 12 hours for a minor fault. Actual fault response and clear times are reported at board level on a monthly basis and the average response times for all faults for the last 12 months were 4hrs 9mins with average clear time of 1hr 10mins.

During the course of the fault, the help desk will provide regular updates to the fault originator, particularly to request site access if required, and will perform escalations as required. The help desk will co-ordinate any internal and external parties to resolve the fault and will advise customers if faults have been passed to other parties such as carriers or manufacturers. In all cases, South West Communications Group always retains fault ownership and will be the key contact point until fault resolution.

Upon resolution of the fault, the service desk will contact the fault originator and a logged fault closure time will be given and the fault log will be closed. Resolution time will be taken to be the time at which the service desk was advised by the engineer that the fault has been cleared.

Service history reporting - Service history can be communicated via reports prepared by our engineering team detailing all reported faults, the logged history and comments for these faults as well as root cause, resolution codes and fix descriptions and the preventative measures taken or implemented to minimise any recurrence. These reports are invaluable in detecting ongoing problems or recurring issues that may otherwise go undetected. From this, long-term analysis can be performed and potential recommendations can be made on further fine-tuning.

Preventative diagnostics checks can also be provided whereby a specialist engineer will remotely connect to the customer’s phone system on an agreed schedule and run a set of non-intrusive diagnostic applications. These will include monitoring the system’s alarm logs and conducting a routine check of the associated management system. A report will be compiled detailing any findings and recommendations.

These preventative diagnostics are an attempt to provide greater peace of mind to customers who are heavily reliant on their communications infrastructure and need to ensure maximum uptime as a key priority.