You would have heard the proverb that Smoking is injurious to Health. But do you know that a badly managed TAC can cost you lot of dollars and irreparable market reputation for your company.

When a Sales person has sold the product and Deployment team has done the I&C (short for Installation and Commissioning), then comes the most challenging part is to ensure the upkeep of the installed network or as some says to give 99.999% availability. This is where Technical Assistance Center or popularly called as TAC comes into picture.

Arguably, TAC is the most important thing in the ICT (IT and Telecom) Network system. We have seen best product companies fail if they don’t have good quality TAC. Likewise, the companies who has good TAC, result in having happy customers. Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) is mostly linked to a great TAC compared to other departments in the company.

Folks from Telecom/ Networking background are mostly well-versed with importance and TAC working. However, for the sake of uninitiated, here is the brief about how TAC works

 How Does It Work?

Technical Assistance Center services are provided on a time and material basis. End Customer/ Users can reach the TAC through email, phone or web. They are either directed to an available engineer at a Technical Assistance Center or their contact information is captured and shared with an engineer who returns the call within an agreed response time. Calls are prioritized based on a number of factors, including criticality of the event and impact on safety and the environment as well as contractual response commitments.

Generally, 60-80% of support calls are resolved by TAC via email/ telephone support based on Knowledge Management tools, FAQ and available technical documentation. For rest of the cases, it gets routed to Tier 3 Specialist level who then need to do deep technical work like recreating the problem through LAB setup or working with OEM development team to look for the patch.