We think about maintenance as mainly
unnecessary – and get you to insure against it along with our other
customers. We help you to plan to avoid
it. We do as much as we can remotely to
keep the cost down and this helps the environment.
Support services such as additions,
moves and changes to your system takes trained skills and is usually needed
regularly so we build this into our planning with you so you can budget for it
and we can make time available regularly if you wish.
Our aim is to make the relevant portion
of our maintenance and support service a working part of your business when
needed.
You choose how fast you want us to get
to you if the worst happens and we price accordingly.
Ongoing monthly payable contracts
We ask you to pay on an ongoing annual contract but with monthly
payments to support spare people time and parts to respond promptly to your
needs when the worst happens.
Priority attendance
To protect the commitment and investment by our maintenance customers
someone not on a maintenance contract will be seen after maintenance contract
customers.
Parts availability
Equipment we purchase for our forward parts stock for maintenance is a
high cost to our small business and is only available to maintenance contract
customers. Other customers may have to
wait for delivery of replacements.
Lower cost services for contract
customers
We differentiate in the hourly pricing rate of our chargeable activity
in other services by offering lower hourly rates to maintenance customers.
General support included
We add general support to service pricing to help make this provision
the more important part of our revenue stream adding value to your day to day use
of the systems and services we provide.
Planning to avoid problems
Some of this is about what you buy – so we take care in selecting
products for sale that suit the harsh requirement of “real time” use around the
clock, whatever the temperature in the building – these need 99.999% uptime –
that’s less than half a day a year down – and long lifetimes.
We don’t do cheap and nasty for phone systems – you wouldn’t thank
us.
Choosing resilience and appropriate line
services
The
rest is selecting the most resilient services your business needs for lines,
data and internet connection that meet your ability to pay – because problems
here are less easy to forecast and sadly on the increase.
For the record – a business with no contingency planning for communications
failure is statistically 96% likely to fail in 7 days – ask the people in the
businesses in a chunk of Manchester a few years ago after a fibre line
connection that provided all the lines to them was a fortnight in
re-connection…
So, at the outset we try to help customers to plan for future
problems. This is the key to keeping
communications systems working almost all the time.
Nature is bigger than us – a good storm that takes down a telegraph pole
with phone lines on it for a small customer or people working from home is a
luck of the draw problem many customers face – but if mobile phones don’t work
anywhere close by we will insist more than once that contingency planning takes
this into account and reviews it.
Keeping power one step removed
Lightening protection comes at a very high price and we have options
available – but for most customers insurance is the option selected
Our customers agree that allowing power network general power surges
into electronic equipment is unacceptable business practise for telecommunications and computer equipment.
Most also agree that battery protection for weather based problems for a
couple of hours or more are essential for at least voice systems. Of course this is business dependent, but
today there are really low price options almost all customers can afford.