Managed plans
Response times
What happens when you call HCS, and how fast. The same guaranteed response times on every managed plan — no premium tier for being answered quickly.
Most IT providers bury their response times in a forty-page agreement. Here are ours on a public page, in plain English.
These are the same on every plan. We do not sell a faster answer as an upgrade — how quickly we pick up should not depend on which tier you are on. What changes between plans is how much of your business we are watching, not how fast we respond when you call.
How fast we respond
Response time means how long before a human who can help is engaged with your problem — not an automated ticket receipt.
- Critical — you cannot trade. Site down, ransomware, no email across the business, no access to your line-of-business system. 15 minutes during business hours.
- High — someone cannot work. A person or team is stopped, with no workaround. 1 hour during business hours.
- Normal — it is broken but there is a way around it. Annoying, slowing someone down, not stopping them. 4 business hours.
- Low — a request rather than a fault. New starter setup, a software install, a question. 1 business day.
We define "critical" generously. If your business cannot trade, it is critical, and we are not going to argue the category with you while you are losing money.
Business hours
Business hours are 8:00am to 5:00pm AWST, Monday to Friday, excluding WA public holidays.
Outside those hours, critical issues reach an on-call engineer rather than a voicemail box. After-hours attendance on anything that is not critical is arranged and quoted like any other out-of-scope work — see what's included.
What we don't guarantee
We guarantee how fast we respond. We do not guarantee how fast a problem is resolved, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does at this end of the market.
Resolution time depends on things outside our control — a vendor's support queue, a hardware part on backorder, a cloud provider's outage. Promising a number we cannot control would either be a lie or something you would have to pay a great deal more for. What we will do is tell you honestly where a problem is up to and what happens next.
Ready to stop firefighting