A vital requirement for the success of any outsourced communications service is the provision of a quality support service for all the products that make up that service. Data Connection offers a range of first-class support services for its Conferencing solutions to ensure that this requirement is fully and properly addressed:
- a comprehensive software support, maintenance and consultancy service ("Standard Support")
- a help-line service offering extended-hours access to support engineers for routine problem assistance and trouble-shooting ("Help-Line Support")
- a 24 * 7 hot-line call-out service for any high-severity problem in the field that demands immediate resolution ("Hot-Line Support")
- a comprehensive set of Professional Services for planning, installation, customization and deployment.
Each customer is able to select a combination of these services, tailored to their particular requirements. Should any customer find that they have specialist requirements that are not covered by the services described here, then we are happy to discuss a customized service to address these requirements.
Standard Support Service
Despite its name, the "Standard" Support service is actually described by many customers as being the best they have ever experienced in terms of the quality of the support it provides. There are three key aspects to the way that we provide our Standard Support that combine to deliver this "over-the-top" service.
- Data Connection
resources this support service from the same pool of top-class engineers
who design and develop the Conferencing solutions.
The support staff are highly trained, extremely qualified personnel who are familiar with the specific range of products they are tasked with supporting. The staff are drawn from the development team that implement the products being supported, and have on average many years of software engineering experience with Data Connection, having been originally educated at and recruited from one of the top UK Universities.
- Data Connection's
business model is to focus on a small number of strategic customers. This
enables the creation of a tightly-knit support organization with direct
lines of communication to the key personnel.
Each customer has a group of 2 or 3 engineers from the support team, plus a support manager, who are all fully familiar with that customer's own project and its particular requirements and objectives. Incoming support calls are not allocated across a wide, nameless range of staff, but are directed to the relevant individuals who are most familiar with the particular customer. In this way, long-term relationships are built between the Data Connection and customer support staff, which helps to ensure mutual understanding and collective team spirit.
- Data Connection
sets no limits or boundaries to the amount of contact made by a customer
through this service (via any combination of phone, email or fax).
This unlimited access encourages communications between customer and supplier, and is simple to administer and manage. It also ensures that should Data Connection's documentation or training material be shown to be lacking in any way (and therefore creating an additional support burden), then it is in our best interests to improve and rectify such issues.
In detail, Standard Support provides the following elements of service:
- Query resolution - whether it be with respect to function usage, configuration problems, assistance with problem diagnosis or general information requests.
- Customer Fault Reporting (CFR) service - to record a software or documentation fault, and provide any workaround that may be available.
- CFR fix provisioning - to track and report on the creation, testing and release of a permanent fix to a previously-raised CFR.
- Request For Enhancement (RFE) analysis - rather than a simple "not currently supported" response, Data Connection's support staff can analyse any RFE and give a firm response as to how best to deal with this new requirement. This response can be to suggest an alternative mechanism which is available, or can be to commit to providing the feature in the next major or minor release of the product, or can be to offer to implement the feature for an FPFT (Fixed Price, Fixed Timescale) services contract.
- Regular Customer Status Report - usually weekly, this report summarizes status of individual CFRs, reports on other CFRs from the field that the customer may need to know about, RFE status, and raises specific project issues that require discussion, and is usually reviewed and discussed by regular conference call.
- Customer Support Reviews - usually quarterly, these reviews comprise a written document that summarizes the previous period's support to the customer and recommends any changes or improvements for the following period; production of the document is followed by a meeting (usually at the customer's site) to fully discuss the document and obtain the customer's feedback.
A key part of the service is Data Connection's ability to respond quickly and effectively to CFRs. Due to the very close relationship between our engineering teams and support teams, the reaction time is very short. This ensures that best efforts are applied in order to meet the agreed criteria for providing a workaround or fix to the problem.
Help-Line Support Service
The Hot-Line Support service (see below) is available around-the-clock for high-priority issues. Some customers like to benefit from having trained staff available during their working day to answer those straightforward queries that could wait until the next day for a response, but would make life a little easier if they were discussed with someone immediately. This is the reason for providing the Help-Line service.
The Help-Line Support service is a telephone/fax/email service available from 6pm to 9am (i.e. to cover around the clock outside of Standard Support hours), Monday to Friday. The purpose of the Help-Line service is to provide a similar level of support to that which is available through the Standard Support service, but outside of office hours.
- Out-of-hours Query resolution.
- Customer Fault Reporting (CFR) service - to record a software or documentation fault and action it for resolution, and to provide any workaround that may be available (the fix action itself, and the tracking of and reporting on the creation, testing and release of a permanent fix, is the responsibility of the UK Standard Support team).
- Customer Help-Line Status Report -
produced as an addendum to the Standard Support report, this itemizes the customer's usage of the Help-Line
service during the previous status period and reports on any support issues that require attention.
Hot-Line Support Service
Conferencing services, particularly those deployed as outsourced/hosted services, are mission-critical systems. It is therefore vital that, should a critical fault occur in the service, all required resource is brought to bear to resolve the fault as quickly as possible.
Our Hot-Line Support service is a full 24x7x365 around-the-clock support service, staffed by skilled engineers based in Data Connection's offices in the UK and both East Coast and West Coast of the United States. The service operates as follows.
- The customer is provided with a Hot-Line telephone number plus a secure website with full details of how to use the Hot-Line service, including additional escalation numbers.
- The Hot-Line number provides immediate access to a qualified Data Connection engineer who is familiar with not just the product being supported but also that customer's specific installation.
- In those few cases where the called engineer cannot resolve the problem immediately, he will liaise with other colleagues and Data Connection management in order to obtain the necessary resources to deal with the problem, until such time as a workaround or solution is implemented which either resolves the problem completely, or downgrades its urgency sufficiently to allow the Hot-Line call to be closed.
- On closure of the call, our staff produces a comprehensive report which itemizes how the issue was dealt with, identifies what the underlying causes were, and sets any recommendations needed both for our product QA processes and the customer's own operational processes.
Our primary aim is to develop and deliver software products to
our customer base that have no need of any emergency service. However, even by its own high standards, software is
not problem-free, and therefore the Hot-Line service is provided as a comprehensive back-up to a customer's own
operations and support staff to ensure the best possible service to the end-user.
Professional Services
To complement our Conferencing Solutions, we provide a complete range of Professional Services encompassing
- deployment planning and consultation
- systems integration engineering services
- specialized customer-specific feature enhancement
- education and training of administration and support staff
- product installation and verification
- maintenance releases and upgrade service for new product feature releases.
All our support staff - technical support, maintenance engineers, education and training, professional services, and 24*7 operational support staff - are engineers who have previously worked in the development teams that create and evolve the software solutions in our development labs.
For more information about Data Connection's Conferencing solutions, please contact .