Offsite Support and Management

From the outset Cutter has drawn upon prior experience of remotely managing web servers located around the world. That experience proved to us that it's possible to provide high levels of support without an on-site presence. It's not just theoretically important to us, annual support income is a crucial part of our business and we have to get it right.

As we say in Low-impact installation techniques

We try to 'work smart' rather than just work hard. We don't like driving all over the country and our staff prefer to be at home because it's pleasanter there than in a noisy server room at a client's site. If we have to travel we will do it but it's not our first choice.

In the beginning we didn't have the staff or the geographical coverage to provide on-site support to customers based all over the UK, but our customers weren't confined to a single region.

Ensuring that we didn't have to visit our customers was the best way of providing timely support with the resources we had. So we made a virtue out of necessity and ensured that we kept our costs low too.

We have concentrated on designing systems which can be remotely supported and managed with minimal intervention at our customers' sites. In the rare cases where hardware swapping is required, we don't need to attend in person if a customer's technician can do it instead. This usually suits our customers well since it means there is no need to meet us or supervise us while we are on-site and tasks can be scheduled for their convenience rather that ours. It means that time-to-fix is typically shorter because we can start trouble-shooting without having to travel and, if necessary, we only have to get hardware delivered on-site rather than scheduling an installation visit.

We discovered that, if a problem was slow in being reported to us, no matter how quickly we fixed it we still got blamed for the delay. Nowadays few of our our systems are supplied without built-in monitoring and management software. As a consequence, problems can be diagnosed immediately that they are reported and rectified directly by our staff, often before they are even noticed by the users. The performance graphs and statistics provide useful reporting tools.

The proof of whether this works or not is in the satisfaction levels of our clients. We are happy to provide references to prospective clients or partners if you want to find out what our customers say.