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The Importance of Response Times and Communicating System Support Needed

As most of our clients know it not much fun when an aspect of the system goes down or is not working as it should. It’s not as much aggravation if you have a reliable service company to be ready when the call comes. One key step in making sure that the support system is always in place is setting up response time for Emergency and Non-emergency calls. If this is set up ahead of time, as it would be in an M3T Service Support Agreement, there is no question as to when the service company should be on site. The other key ingredient to making all this work is relying on the customer to communicate the severity or level of the outage or system failure. Most response times are set up as different actions whether it be an Emergency or Non-Emergency call. In the event, it’s an emergency call the service company will need to know that when the call comes in so it can be responded to accordingly. The same goes for a Non-emergency call. If it is a non-emergency call it is very helpful for a service company to know that so the call can be placed on the next open time slot on the schedule. Normal emergency call response times can range from 2-4 hours or same day service. Some systems are more essential and cannot be unmonitored by the system or security guards. It is important to remedy the issue as soon as possible to elevate paying for a full-time employee to stand guard. Even Non-emergency calls have their level of importance. Being Non-emergency does not mean it can wait weeks on end for service to be performed. Most non-emergency calls should be attended to within 2-3 business days unless other arrangements have been made by the customer. Again, the communication from the end-users is as important as the communications from the service contractor after the call comes in. Ensuring the correct information is provided upfront and the severity level of the system failure is vital to make sure the call can be responded to when it is necessary.

As a proactive measure to decrease the number of service calls, a customer can take the option to have preventative maintenance performed on their system. This will hopefully decrease the amount of Non-Emergency and more so Emergency calls so the amount of downtime and vulnerability can be decreased.

Matt Seymore

Account Manager