NEC XON has deployed its fully-fledged Technical Assistance Centre (TAC) that bolsters its existing service desk and contributes to the organisation's vision of managed services for its customers.

The TAC monitors physical networks, its personnel perform configuration management, handle implementations, perform remote management, manage service level agreements (SLA), report, and manage governance for customers, among other activities.

"This capability is crucial to our role as a systems integrator (SI) because it means we can take care of our customers' non-core activities so that they can get on with focusing on their strengths," says Mark Harris, marketing director of NEC XON. "It also streamlines the number of service providers that they have to manage, the vendors, and the spare and replacement part equipment that they have to keep onsite."

"A large part of what we do is manage customer expectations correctly," says Ilze Nel, TAC manager at NEC XON. "We maintain all the analytics required to conduct full adherence to service level agreements (SLA) and customer relationship management (CRM). We conduct remote monitoring services that help us to proactively engage issues before they become problems while service delivery managers liaise directly with clients and our internal systems are inline with ITIL standards," she says.

Variously skilled technicians staff the TAC who provide immediate telephone support to customers. Management services monitor customer premise equipment offering a variety of functionality. These include network operations centre (NOC) support. Site access is also remotely managed and TAC performs all customer repair and maintenance as required, managing vendor relationships as well as swap out equipment, returns and collections on behalf of customers, within agreed vendor SLAs.

Customers can opt for various levels of assistance from tier one to tier 3, while administrators follow up and liaise with customers and engineers. Service delivery managers report directly to customers with full statistics and reporting capabilities that include everything from call loggings to recordings and more.

NEC XON's TAC and support centre is ISO 9001 and 27001-certified and operates open source remote diagnostics tools that enable it to hook into customer diagnostics, regardless of their brand or vendor, that provide instantly readable dashboards with drilldown capabilities.