It is recommended all owners of telephone systems take out a maintneance contract on their phone system.
A maintenance agreement gives a number of benifits over a pay as you go call-out structure.
A specific telephone system maintenance agreement gives you 1. A contracted SLA (service level agreement) 2. HArdware and Labour cover
As an added benefit Smartinfo also throw in some free moves and changes into our maintenance contracts, that is we provide a number of free dial-ins over the term of the contract, often refered to as MOCs – or moves and changes, such as phone name changes or ring group tweeks.
What is often overlooked is the cheap cost of maintenance, on our survey of our customer base Telephon system maintenance if less than 10% of the price of IT support for the same company. If you consider a company still uses telephony for customer contact at least as much as email and web this offers great value. Also most IT contracts do not offer hardware cover, whereas a smartinfo phone maintenance contract covers all hardware failures and the labour to replace or fix, within an SLA of commonly 4 or 8 hours.
If you refer to our life of a phone system blog post it is interesting to note that maintenance or service contract also covers software upgrades.
Some people relate a service contract to consumer items such as washing machines or fridges, or even business products like photocopiers, but these items tend to have a single mechanical part, and a modernday phone system is software driven and a business critical component – in fact we would argue as important as the business premisis, or staff.