Further to our correspondence last week we wanted to write to update you on our position regarding the escalating situation surrounding COVID-19 outbreak.
Our focus remains on keeping our staff safe and well and as a business we have of course taken all appropriate action to ensure this. The team have responded extremely well to all of the changes we have implemented to their working environment to date and we are very proud of the resilience they are showing in what are very challenging times for all. Their dedication is to be applauded.
Our collective and primary priority is however, of course, to ensure that EMCS can continue to deliver the vital function of protecting the people and property of our mutual end-users.
As this situation unfolds and our resources are further stretched, we will obviously need to ensure that we can sustain service levels and this will mean we have to be agile in our approach to prioritising alarms in order to achieve this effectively. With this in mind and in addition to the cross skilling and restructuring measures we have put the following additional provisions in place across the organisation:
Admin Processing Thresholds:
A decision has been made to remove the time thresholds from our ordering and edit requests directed to our admin department; we have already seen a surge in inbound activity and whilst we are managing to honour the same working day completion promise we provide standardly, we will naturally need to reprioritise this as this situation progresses. We therefore ask that you remain patient as there may be some delays in processing requests further along the line.
Automation on Lower priority Alarms:
We have been working with our software provider to enable the capability to distribute lower priority alarm handling via our automated services, where appropriate, should we need to. These notifications will be sent by way of SMS Text notifications or email where possible, the alarm events that we anticipate this service could apply to are: - AC Power Fail, Battery Fail, BT Link Down, BT Link OK, Fault Alarms, Mains Failure, Low Battery, Low RF Battery, Panel Fault, Power Loss, PSTN Low Voltage and System Trouble.
The use of the automated services will enable our team to respond to the increasing pressures we anticipate ahead and allow focus to remain on escalating the higher priority alarms such as: Fire, Personal Attack, Confirmed Intruder, CCTV, Audio/Visual Intruder, Environmental, Medical, Lone Worker alarms.
Of course best endeavours will be made to provide a personal escalation for ALL alarms however these are extreme times and we are sure that you will appreciate this is a necessary and responsible provision to have in place as we see out the next few weeks and all that we anticipate this may bring.
Message Handling Services:
Regrettably EMCS is unable to provide any additional Message Handling Services at present; we will however honour the out-of-hours cover-line facilities we are already currently committed to.
Remote Working:
Outside of our core operation we have a number of support staff currently working remotely from home ensuring that we can continue to support you in other areas of the business. This number will no doubt increase as and when we finalise arrangement to enable this. Obviously this temporary set-up may impact on work flow and responses times as staff will be utilising remote access facilities which naturally can operate at lower processing speeds, people may also be cross-skilling so may take a little longer to process your request so we ask that you bear that in mind when corresponding with our team.
We thank you for your support, patience and understanding at this time.
As always, if you have any additional concerns or questions please do get in touch.
Assuring you of our best intentions at all times.
Andrew
