Avaya's support model

[Gloaming]

Hello,


I'm an IT manager with a networking background who has been put in charge of the company's Definity G3R7 phone switches. I've never been responsible for a phone switch before, and my knowledge of phone systems is extremely limited. The phone system in question is about 5 years old and has never been under a maintenance contract of any kind.

I'm told that my staff cannot fully administer the phone system because we do not have either the D2ADMIN or CRAFT passwords. When I contacted a couple of local Avaya partners, I was told that only partners were given this level of access.

My question is this: are all phone system manufacturers the same in regards to limiting what changes the customer can make to the systems that they sell? What reasons does Avaya give to limit access like they do? To a non-phone system person (me) this smacks of extortion. It seems that I have no choice but to pay an Avaya partner a lot of money to make simple changes to the phone system that my staff would be able to make if only they had the proper level of access.

Thanks,
Gloaming

 

[smoody3]

You can purchases ASG as a RTU for your logins, but it still won't work for an AVAYA/Service Level login. You would need there pin to put into your key to get past the challenges.

 

[cmcdan1523]

I don't like the answer "you have as much permission as you need". When I need to perform maintenance on my PBX to get it back in service, I should have the permissions to perform any command I need. There are times when you need to work on your system, and you only have access to half of the required commands. You cannot fully test a DCIU link - for example. You cannot test ISDN-PRI signalling.
We pay a lot of money for maintenance, and the Avaya support is lousy. I don't call support unless the issue cannot be resolved by our very experienced and well trained staff.
The technicians are always rude.
They will not provide status of the work they are performing.
They try and berate the customer to hide their incompetence.
It takes hours to get to a level which can actually troubleshoot issues. Each level of support starts from the beginning reading and typing commands from the maintenance book.
Using that logic (you have the level of access which you need), we should not have to pay for support when they are required to perform commands we do not have access to.

At least on my windows pc, I have the correct level of permissions to break it if I want to.

That is my vent for the day.

 

[Toni269]

I have Avaya maintenance and while I will say the service is nothing like it was 5 years ago, they still resolve all of my problems and I've never, ever had a rude tech on site and people on the phone when they don't know will escillate. I've had trouble a time or two with an inexperienced tech level 1 but then you can just request level 2, 3.

Before signing my Avaya contract I got quotes from 3rd party Avaya maintenance vendors which were extremely inexpensive. (One quote was only $1,000.00 per month for 24x7 support). You can always buy the maintenance commands from Avaya and they aren't expensive at all. You could do this as an alternative to signing an Avaya contract. I agree heavily with PeavyPhones - - Our switch has never been down, never faltered and definately has five 9's reliability, this is what you're paying for.