Service & Support
South West Communications Group operates an industry-leading support infrastructure that provides our clients with a professional, responsive facility to address all areas of day-to-day maintenance requirements and fault rectification. This is underpinned by 25 years’ experience in the field of telecommunications and 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 24/7 remote engineering team allows the delivery of support packages to organisations that require fast response times and total cover options. The number of support engineers and their geographical location reflects the number of clients that we support in a particular region and the support agreements that are in place to ensure that we meet and exceed our contractual responsibilities and commitments.
Our support packages are broken down into five key products sets (see separate fact sheet), which can also be customised to suit more specific and individual requirements. We operate a help desk facility with six front office staff to process fault calls and to allocate our engineers.
South West Communications Group considers performance both critical to customer satisfaction and meeting its own key performance indicators, which are reported at board level on a monthly basis. We consider the customer relationship to be a key element of the ongoing relationship. To achieve this, we put support agreements in place that form success of the project and the cornerstone of the service provision. This is underpinned by the customer support structure that deals with customers delivering business critical services.
South West Communications Group prides itself on the fact that 60 percent of its new business comes from existing customers or customer referrals; in no small part due to the account management team that provide a single point of contact to all its customers. A dedicated account manager would provide regular telephone contact and meetings to make sure a customer is receiving the best care and service possible and to provide advice on any moves, alterations, growth and new technology. Customers may also be asked to participate in our regular customer satisfaction surveys to ensure our services meet and exceed their expectations.
What happens if a fault occurs?
The customer will invoke their support contract by contacting our help desk or out-of-hours helpline. 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. The caller will be given a unique fault log number and advised of the agreed fault log time - it is this time that all response times for on-site and off-site work will be measured and reported against. The help desk will raise a fault repair request detailing the problem.
Regardless of the type of support contract, we will undertake a remote diagnostics session within one hour of the fault log time. We consistently achieve greater than 60 percent of fault rectifications via remote diagnostics with average fault rectification time of less than an hour.
Regular fault progress reporting is essential to ensure that our customers are kept up to date on the progress being made. These updates will be provided to the person who reported the fault, particularly if site access is 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.
The help desk will invoke escalation processes where appropriate, advising the caller that this has been done. In addition to this, our fault repair requesting system has a timed, automated escalation procedure which cannot be overridden to ensure that an ongoing problem will be made known at director level if no resolution to customer satisfaction is found to the problem.
Upon resolution of the fault, the help desk will contact the fault originator and request confirmation of the fault clearance. Upon confirmation a logged fault closure time will be given and the fault log will be closed. If the help desk cannot contact the caller directly when the incident is cleared, they will make at least one more attempt after a reasonable time followed by an emailed written notification.