Support Services

Our support service is often described by customers as being the best they have ever experienced. There are three key aspects to the way that we provide our support that combine to deliver this "over-the-top" service.

• Metaswitch resources the support service from the same pool of top-class engineers who design and develop the network software products.
   
  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 teams that implemented the products being supported, and have on average many years of software engineering experience with Metaswitch.
   
• Metaswitch'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 Metaswitch and customer support staff, which helps to ensure mutual understanding and collective team spirit.
   
• Metaswitch 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 Metaswitch'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.
   

The support service includes the following elements:

• Query resolution - whether it be with respect to function usage, configuration problems, assistance with problem diagnosis or general information requests.
• Software Fault Reporting (SFR) service - to record a software or documentation fault, and provide any workaround that may be available.
• SFR fix provisioning - to track and report on the creation, testing and release of a permanent fix to a previously-raised SFR.
• SFR Website Access - to review and track raised SFRs on a secure customer accessible website.
• Request For Enhancement (RFE) analysis - rather than a simple "not currently supported" response, Metaswitch's support staff can analyze 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) professional services contract.
• Periodic Maintenance Releases - which wrap up fixes to date (generated across the full customer set) and incremental feature releases. Note that we do not require customers to update to the latest release, and will continue to provide the support service against the last release version that the customer took, together with any fixes applied against that release.
• Regular Customer Status Report - usually weekly, this report summarizes status of individual SFRs, reports on other SFRs 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 Metaswitch's ability to respond quickly and effectively to SFRs. Due to the very close relationship between our engineering teams and support teams, the turnaround 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.