Technical Support Services - Quality

Quality service

As part of our constant drive to improve our service to our network support clients, we have developed our own database software systems designed to assist our technicians to assist you, the user.

Details of each support call (and its solution) are entered in our specially tailored CRM system against the client/user/item of equipment. This means that a complete record of support history is maintained and is available to the technician on subsequent calls. This builds up a comprehensive knowledge base of issues and resolutions specific to each client thus allowing any recurrence of a past issue to be remedied in the shortest possible time and with the least possible disruption to our clients’ operations.

Another new system about to be brought on-line is our server monitoring software. Up to present, each time we reviewed a server’s health and status we have recorded the details in our CRM system. However, whilst this provides a history for each server, it was not easy to extract trend information which would sometimes indicate a problem before it was otherwise evident. We decided that monitoring and maintenance of the servers under our care was of such importance that we have designed a dedicated system to record and manage this process. A series of statistics will be recorded into a database each time a review takes place and will be compared against benchmarks for that particular server. Any breach of the guideline measures will result in an automated alert which will then be passed to our CRM system where remedial action can be controlled and recorded.

Reports will be available for each server showing trends in temperature, hard drive space, available memory and other performance measures to indicate issues before they become critical.

Also in order to enhance our quality of service we have tailored or internal procedures to focus on technical support as a primary function. We have created a structure where ‘first line’ support provides the initial contact with the client user. It is his/her task to identify the issue and, if possible, provide an immediate solution. In circumstances where further analysis or greater experience/ technical know-how is required, first line support will record as much relevant information as possible before forwarding the issue to a specialist in that particular field. This ‘second level’ of support will take up the issue and, sometimes after liaising with third-party software/hardware vendors, provide the solution to the client as efficiently as possible. The original technician remains responsible for the case throughout and will more often than not be the single contact with the user as this maintains continuity for the client and ensures that knowledge of the solution passes to first-line support technicians.

The CRM system we use to control our support operations also performs a monitoring function. This is, in many ways, a safety net for our clients. The system checks each and every outstanding case every 5 minutes and reports to technical management whenever our guidelines on service levels are breached. Any case where there has not been a response by our staff after 30 minutes will create a prompt be email to our technical manager and any still not auctioned after two hours results in an email to our technical director. These emails are a rare occurrence indeed as they are there to backstop the ‘minimum’ response but we feel it is an important element of our performance monitoring systems.

These changes to our methods and procedures are working to provide the client with the best possible support service and we at RNS Consultants are constantly looking to make further improvements.

90% of all support calls are solved immediately (ie with a single client contact) and only 2% of cases require either a site visit or system downtime within working hours. These are statistics of which we are very proud, but they are also targets from which we improve.