Grow your business through Cisco Services

While local businesses wait with bated breath between load-shedding bouts and struggle to keep up with the amount of skills needed in the rapidly changing IT landscape, Cisco Services promises to help WestconGroup Southern Africa customers avoid disaster and potential lost hours by providing them the support they need to keep their customers' businesses on, no matter what.

By capitalising on a Cisco SMARTnet Total Care Service from WestconGroup Southern Africa, businesses can give their customers access to a global backup team, extensive product support and myriad resources that will assist enterprises in helping customers deal with unexpected problems or outages in their network, and in turn reap the benefits within their own organisations.

More than just a service

A Cisco SMARTnet Total Care Service provides customers with a Technical Assistance Centre (TAC) that gives them access to a global team of trained Cisco customer support engineers that are ready and waiting to assist them with troubleshooting and solving technical problems. These engineers are contactable around the clock, 365 days a year, via the Web, an e-mail or a telephone call, with assistance available in multiple languages.

"TAC engineers have on average a minimum of five years' technical support experience and over 630 of them have a CCIE certification, so our customers can rest assured that the TAC will provide them effective case responses and rapid issue resolution, to avoid the negative business impact felt by customers from network downtime," says Hanle Carver, Services Solutions Director at WestconGroup Southern Africa.

Depending on your region and the availability of depots, customers can receive advance hardware replacement that is flexible and on a device-by-device basis, with rapid access to critical replacement parts within either a two-hour, four-hour or next-business-day delivery option. The parts required will never be too far either, as Cisco has more than 1 100 parts depots worldwide holding a spares inventory of $4 billion.

With a Cisco SMARTnet Total Care Service, WestconGroup customers will gain access to ongoing Cisco software operating system support that includes all Cisco IOS software updates for licensed feature sets provided via service contracts, new features that provide more advanced security, interoperability and greater regulatory compliance as well as major, minor and maintenance releases including the latest security updates, patches and bug fixes.

"The benefits of this service are seemingly endless as customers gain access to the cisco.com knowledge base and tools that include 40 interactive trouble-shooting and network management tools for installation, configuration, design and assessment. In addition the Smart Capabilities Entitlement provides security and product alerts, service coverage management and product lifestyle management," says Carver.

Reap the rewards

Through selling Cisco Services, WestconGroup customers will open up the doors for their customers to feel more at ease and for themselves to gain tangible business benefits like cash rebates from services sales through the Cisco Services Partner Programme (CSPP).

"If customers sell multi-year contracts they will receive additional discounts that can be passed on to their own customers, so that they can lock in prices and increase customer loyalty. In addition, enhanced service levels mean that you can leverage a 30-day sparing period so Cisco can put resource and spares in place for the install site," says Carver.

"By adding Cisco services to their own portfolio's WestconGroup customers are getting more than a product, they are getting an experience, customer loyalty and access to a global resource pool that is designed to be an extension of their own teams."