Support and Help Desk
Support services for mission critical communications systems
Introduction
As many of our customers run business-critical or mission critical systems they need the confidence that we are here to support them if something goes wrong. We provide a range of technical support from telephone support office-hours-only through to 24/7/365 support with engineer call-out and guaranteed response times.
Incident severity levels
We provide technical support for our customers at three response levels
P1: for immediate problems, faults and emergencies that affect central system infrastructure, severely degraded comms performance or a large number of mobile devices – 4 hour response
P2: for urgent problems that are not P1 but may lead to degraded performance in a geographic area or some feature not fully working – 8 hour response before next day
P3: for faults that may apply to only one vehicle or a minor feature – initial response next working day
Support hours
We can provide three levels of cover for response to respond to the various levels of incident:
Office Hours: 09:00-17:00 hours UK local time five days a week (Monday to Friday)
Extended Hours: 06:00-22:00 hours UK local time five days a week (Monday to Friday)
Full cover: 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year based on a contracted service level that includes guaranteed response times and estimated times-to-repair.
Helpdesk Service
Our support staff and help desk service is based on:
- Knowledgeable and trained staff with in-depth experience of our solutions
- Thorcom staff based in the UK – we do not use overseas agencies or contractors
- Direct knowledge of customer sites and operational procedures
- Unlimited 24×7 coverage (depending on contract)
- Support of P1, P2 and P3 issues
- Powerful remote support
- Proactive monitoring of servers and mobile devices
- Server Management
- Application support
We have a team of on-call support engineers that are trained in the operation of your systems and have access to internal detailed customer documentation along with fault finding “triage systems” so that if something goes wrong we can be efficient at finding the fault and providing a remedy or work-around to get you “back on air” as fast as possible.
Trouble tickets
We have implemented a “trouble ticket” system and all support calls are logged, assigned a ticket and handed to the most appropriate support engineer depending on the customer, solution and support level.
Trouble tickets allow us to manage all support requests, ensure the correct outcomes and perform trend analysis. We can also report on our performance of handling incidents to our customers.
Support review meetings
We have internal support review meetings each Wednesday where we analyse calls, ensure that incidents have been dealt with appropriately and that the customer is satisfied.
We use “lessons learned” from incident, support tickets and customer feedback to improve our business processes and Quality System.
Escalation process
In the unlikely event that a customer does not receive the level of support that they expect when they place a call for support we provide an escalation procedure to a Senior Manager or Director of the company that is able to call upon additional resources, as needed, to respond and help resolve an issue.