ARG helps businesses in the DC metro area find, implement, and maintain technology solutions, but our reach extends much further across the U.S. and internationally. With that breadth of clientele comes immense responsibility for requests to help and handle a plethora of technology problems. Luckily, ARG’s Implementation Engineers (IE) are always at the ready to solve the issues at hand.
Recently, an ARG client with a two-vendor Hosted Voice and Data solution contacted us, stating there was not enough bandwidth for the amount of people in their office. They had a 3M circuit, and were having call quality issues.
In ARG IE Matt West’s own words he describes how he moved forward with solving the problem while using a technology of his own to reduce customer impact:
“On Friday, ARG Account Manager, Ron, called me to take a look at a utilization report that our Client Services had received. While on the phone with Ron I opened the report and, to me, it made no logical sense. Only 1.5M were accounted for in the report, and it included three unlabeled columns of data that were indecipherable. So, using ARG’s fancy new phones, I bridged on the client’s data vendor and asked if he would be able to FaceTime with me from the client’s LAN room in order take a look at their HPBX vendor’s router and reduce travel time/customer impact.
Forty-five minutes later the data vendor used FaceTime to call me from the client’s LAN room, and I led him to the router and the card where the T1s go in. One of the Ts was in alarm, so the report showing 1.5M was correct. In leading him to the ports, he bumped the cable for the faulty T1 and it came back up. Then, he went to replace the patch cable and the guts of the port came out.
We reached out to the HPBX vendor and let them know their router has a faulty card. As a result, I asked them to replace it, and they shipped a new card to the client for the data vendor tech to install. The HPBX vendor does not send techs on premise, so I gave detailed step by step instructions to the data tech.
In the morning, prior to the arrival of our client’s employees and per request, I was on-site with the data vendor tech, and I replaced the card in the router for him. The faulty port on the card I replaced looks as though someone dropped something fairly heavy on the patch cable and yanked it out of the port, the metal is all bent outward. Thankfully, all is well now and there was minimum impact for the client.”
All is well that ends well, here at ARG. Fortunately for our company we have people like Matt on our team who think outside the box and use available technology when problems arise. FaceTime has been a key part of our IE’s ability to assist clients that are a significant distance away from our headquarters. It minimizes impact time for our clients, and allows our IE’s to assist more businesses by not filling their time with travel.
Thanks for sharing, Matt! There’s no doubt we’ll have many more value add/success stories in ARG’s future.
