A helpdesk for fire and security contractors that works from email
Fault reports, call-out requests and quote requests all arrive in your shared mailbox. Dispatch Layer turns each one into a ticket with the right customer, site and contract response time. When the work is real, your team raises the Simpro job from the ticket.
The service desk runs on email whether you like it or not
A panel showing a fault on Monday morning, a request to add a door to the access system and a remedial quote chase can all arrive in the same ten minutes. They come from people who will never use a portal, and each one matters to a different contract.
Someone has to read them, work out whose site it is, decide how urgent it is and then type it into Simpro. When that person is busy or away, reports wait, and the response time on the contract keeps running.
Dispatch Layer does the reading and sorting, and keeps a person in charge of anything that commits your engineers.
From fault report to Simpro job
The report comes in
A facilities manager emails about a panel in fault, or a site manager asks for a camera to be moved. It lands in your shared mailbox like it always has, and usually becomes a ticket within a minute.
It is matched and sorted
The ticket is matched to the customer who sent it, put in your category for that system and given a priority. Unclear or commercial requests are held for a person to check.
The clock starts
The SLA comes from that customer's contract, so a customer with a four hour response gets a four hour clock. The ticket goes to the right queue or engineer.
The job is raised
When it needs a visit, the Simpro job is raised from the ticket with the site already chosen. As engineers move the job through its stages, the ticket follows.
A job is never created without someone choosing to create it. Read more about how the shared mailbox helpdesk works.
Built around how fire and security work arrives
Reports from everyone, in one place
Facilities managers, managing agents, monitoring centres and end customers all email the same address. Each report is matched to the right customer instead of sitting in a pile.
Contract response times, tracked
Each ticket shows how long is left against that customer's agreed response time, and a breach is flagged so it does not slip past unnoticed.
Less retyping into Simpro
The person raising the job picks the site and checks the details rather than copying them from an email. Multi-site customers choose from their own sites only.
A record for any dispute
When a customer says they reported a fault days ago, the ticket shows exactly when the email arrived and when your team replied.
Common questions
- Can it tell a fire alarm fault from a CCTV request?
- It classifies each email against your own categories, so if you split work by system the ticket lands in the right category and queue. Anything it is unsure about goes to a review queue for a person to decide rather than being guessed.
- Do the SLAs follow each customer's contract?
- Yes. Where a customer has a contract with response times, the ticket's SLA clock comes from that contract. Customers without one get your standard targets, or no clock at all if you only offer response times under contract.
- Does it create Simpro jobs on its own?
- No. A person decides when a ticket becomes work and raises the job or quote from the ticket. The customer, site and description are filled in, and the job's stage then comes back onto the ticket as engineers move it.
- What about requests that need a quote first?
- Raise a Simpro quote from the ticket instead. When the customer accepts and the quote is converted into a job in Simpro, the ticket picks up the job by itself.
- We do not use Simpro. Is it still useful?
- Yes. The ticketing, SLA tracking, review queue and audit log work on their own. Simpro is the field service system we connect to today.
- Can we prove when a customer reported a fault?
- Every ticket has a timestamped record of when the request arrived and when it was answered, written to an append-only audit log that cannot be edited afterwards.
See it with your own fault reports
Connecting your shared mailbox takes under an hour. The Simpro connection starts read-only, so nothing is created in your build until you decide.