Hello to all AdvanceFirst clients,
These are difficult times for all businesses at the moment due to the onset of the Coronavirus (COVID-19). A situation which we believe is likely to get worse before it gets better. Currently at AdvanceFirst Technologies, we are putting all our efforts into supporting clients and helping them ensure business continuity while this difficult period continues.
With that in mind I would like to share with you our plans for the next few weeks and months.
The government has issued advice on social distancing and avoiding crowded places. It goes without saying, if you show signs of the coronavirus such as a cough or a high temperature then you should go into self isolation immediately for 14 days. For that reason, during this period, we will be aiming to keep face to face meetings with clients to a minimum. We have very good conference call facilities which should be sufficient to conduct meetings for the time being and we can offer our clients a number of options to achieve this.
Because of government advice on social distancing, a large number of our employees will now be encouraged to work from home for extended periods and we cannot say as yet how long this will last. One of my most important roles as a Managing Director is to ensure as far as possible that we look after the health of our employees as best we can, whilst not in any way compromising the day to day business of our clients who will still have very important transactions to conduct across this period. For this reason whilst we will be maintaining a skeleton staff at the office to make sure as many calls as possible are dealt with immediately, we will also be diverting desk phones to the mobile phone of that employee, meaning that no client should have a phone call that is unanswered and a support person should be able to deal with it as soon as is reasonably possible.
Due to our significant investment in technology over the last few years our systems should remain up and running 24 x 7. These can all operate remotely with little or no need for our involvement, which also includes a comprehensive automated application monitoring system, capable of detecting and recovering from potential application issues’. We are also able to expand or contract our capacity upon demand. So if you need us to help you in any way through these difficult times then please just ask…(do you need any more specialist EDI resources or help with specific projects?)
In summary, we can confirm it is our aim to provide ‘business as usual’ and retain current service levels through these challenging times for us all. Should anything change we will of course, update you as soon as possible.
If you have any questions, please contact our support team on: 01932 233980 or email: support@advancefirst.com, and they will be happy to help.
