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 Why pay for Support? - PDF 
Members of the FACSys Authorized Support Team have been supporting FACSys customers since 1995. Supplying and supporting fax servers as part of our services has gained us international recognition. We are considered to be among the best technicians to work with, particularly when it comes to enterprise fax server solutions. In addition to direct technical support, we pro-actively keep you updated on current releases and new product features as they become available.
Within F.A.S.T. there are three teams of support technicians. The eastern groups, based in New Jersey and Toronto, Canada are responsible for all of Canada and the Eastern USA. The western group, based in Denver Colorado covers the rest of the United States of America. We collaborate as needed on multi-site, cross-time zone and cross-border installations. Having a combination of American and Canadian F.A.S.T. partners ensures that your FACSys support is covered in both countries on all statutory holidays except Labor Day, Christmas Day and New Year's Day (unless you have chosen the 7x24 support option).
The cost of a FAST Support Agreement is determined by the number and type of FACSys Servers and Licenses (Client, Channel, SBS, LITE) you own. Please contact your FACSys Authorized Reseller or, Internationally your FACSys Authorized Distributor for pricing information. If you do not have a FAR or FAD, emFAST will be happy to provide you with the names of resellers within your area.
The F.A.S.T. program was designed to provide timely quality technical support to our customers. We have kept the cost of such support at a reasonable level while still providing unlimited support incidents for the period of the contract.
One of the ways to accomplish this balance was to leverage Internet and e-mail technology to the maximum. We require that any support requests are logged through the support request page. A F.A.S.T. technician will contact you within the SLA time.
Here are some benefits to submitting a support request through the web, rather than calling in directly:
Previously resolved problems:
In most cases, someone else has already reported the problem you are experiencing. By asking you to report your problem in detail, our support technician can research your problem and call or e-mail you with an answer (or a patch or hotfix or a Technical Support Bulletin), rather than taking a call 'cold' on the phone. This is more efficient for both you and us. Eighty percent of our tickets are resolved within two hours, even though our Service Level Agreement for initial contact is 4 hours. Over 90 percent of our tickets are 'responded to' within one hour of receiving the ticket.
Getting the best person to solve the problem:
Our technicians have varying degrees of experience and field of expertise. No one can know it all. They specialize in different areas of FACSys support (installation problems, fax card problems, mail gateway problems, to name a few). By having a written ticket, we can escalate it to the best technician who can answer the particular problem, rather than having a less experienced technician try to field a problem on the phone that may be over his/her head. Alternatively a Level 1 technician can consult a Level 2 technician before responding. The benefit to the customer is a more precise answer and faster resolution to the problem.
Communication:
When you fill in a ticket with your contract number, it goes to the technical support queue. With no contract number or if the contract is expired, your ticket goes into the sales queue to be handled by a Sales Representative. Most of our technicians carry Blackberry handhelds to give them instant notification of inbound tickets. Our technicians live in three different cities, two different countries, and two different time zones which provides excellent coverage to our customer base. They often work from a home office. We have determined that this is the most efficient way to handle technical support incidents as opposed to having a call center where people are queued up for a long time, waiting for the next available technician. We get a large volume of support requests per day. To handle that volume of inbound calls to a toll free number would mean having many more technicians and a 'gatekeeper' front-end operator to screen the inbound calls and direct them to the proper technician. This would add considerably to the cost of providing support, which would necessitate an increase in prices.
For mission critical systems we have a Premium Support 7x24 Option available. This provides access to our 7x24 hotline.
Tracking:
The Support tickets are tracked by 'contract number' and 'reported problem'. This provides us with metrics related to customer contact and problem resolution/issues. In many cases our tickets provide a pattern that we can then report to the software manufacturer and ask for a system-wide fix. This benefits everyone.
Commitment:
emFAST Inc. is committed to providing exceptional customer support to our contract holders. Each and every support ticket is followed up by one of our customer service representatives to monitor customer satisfaction.
We are human. Mistakes are made and there are times when customers are not happy. In such cases, emFAST's management gets involved to resolve the issue to everyone's satisfaction. We do not let any dissatisfied customer go untouched. Our objective is to do our best to make every customer happy so that they will be pleased to renew their support contract each year.
Are you happy? We want to hear about it. Are you dissatisfied? We want to hear about that too. For any special comments or requests, please send an email to emfastsales@emfast.com or call emFAST at 1-866-436-3278 and ask to speak to a supervisor. We want to make your support experience with F.A.S.T. just that much better.
We look forward to having you continue as a happy FACSys customer on a F.A.S.T. Support Agreement. Thank you, for your interest and for using FACSys. We truly appreciate your patronage.
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