Coronavirus - Service Desk Availability

We would like to assure customers that Fuse will continue to operate the service desk as normally as possible during the current outbreak. All Fuse employees can work from anywhere, and have full access to all the tools they need to support you. 

As more businesses are preparing for, or already using remote working, the service desk is experiencing a significant increase in support requests. To manage this, we will need to be stricter with our prioritisation system:

• Change requests, and issues that only affect individual users, will be given a low priority and may not be responded to with our usual speed. This has always been our SLA, this is the first time we've had to implement it!
• We will only be accepting new starter/leaver requests via the official form - this is to reduce the amount of questions we inevitably need to go back with when the form is not used.
• We will also be ensuring that any telephone calls received for support have an existing support request ID - please ensure you have this to hand before calling, and only call if you have no other option. This ensures we deal with all of our customers fairly, by preventing queue jumping over the phone.
• When you do call, you may not got straight through to an engineer, and will likely need to leave a contact number for us to call you back. 

Please bear in mind you should always check with your colleagues, and consult resolutions to previous tickets/helpcentre articles before raising any support requests. Helping yourself will always be the quickest option!

We wish everyone the best of health and hope we can all return to business as usual as soon as possible!

Supporting our customers with remote working

Microsoft have provided the following resources for help with remote working. We can assist our customers with implementing these solutions: 

Best practices and discussion for remote work

• Best practices on enabling effective remote work, based on our internal learnings.
• The Microsoft Tech Community has launched a new interactive forum for sharing of best practices and other discussions across fellow customers, partners, and Microsoft subject matter experts

Enabling Teams

• Teams is a pivotal part of the remote work experience, and Microsoft is committed to making Teams available to everyone. Any customer that has either Office 365 will have some level of Teams licensing. if you don't have Office 365, contact us today about a free six-month trial.
• Teams can be used for intra-company chat, calls and videoconferencing. 
• You can join Teams conferences initiated by other companies, or create a conference (meeting) yourself and invite "external" people with Teams - external people joining by phone requires additional licensing.

Additional Resources for not-for-profit, charities and volunteer organisations

• Quickly mobilize volunteers with Office 365 E1 for 6 months for nonprofit volunteers. We should be able to enable these licences for you if needed
• Stay connected to donors, volunteers and beneficiaries. Learn how in Microsoft's blog ‘Delivering online meetings and events.’
• Free training and resources to help you get started:
• Pivoting to Remote Work—COVID-19 Response Course for Nonprofits
• Teams for Nonprofits – Collaboration Tools
• Crash Course in Microsoft Teams
• Microsoft Teams Adoption Guide
• Get work done from anywhere with Microsoft Teams
• Remote Social Work via Teams
• Microsoft Community Training
• LinkedIn Learning - Remote Working: Setting Yourself and Your Teams Up for Success