Learn about your responsibilities as a Maintenance Partner when charge station incidents occur.
Incident notifications
When a station stops functioning, Chargefox can find out via:
- OCPP: a fault or offline event triggers an automated incident notification
- the Chargefox contact centre: a driver calls a support agent to report a fault
- the Chargefox app: a driver reports the fault directly, via the Chargefox app or our support email address
Once raised, our Operations team triages the incident notification in Zendesk, our internal ticketing system.
The incident notification is also sent to the 'Incident Contact' email address nominated by the station's Site host. Often, this Incident Contact is the Site host's maintenance partner (you!).
Maintenance agreements
If Site Hosts are operating public charge stations, we require a signed copy of the maintenance agreement or contract they've entered into with you. This is to ensure that preventative maintenance is undertaken on and that a mitigation plan is in place when incidents occur.
Our Site Host Terms and Conditions state that, if a public station fault is not resolved within 30 days, Chargefox reserves the right to remove the station from our network. It is important that faults are resolved as soon as possible to reduce inconvenience to drivers and loss of revenue to Site hosts.
'Severity 1' incidents
'Severity 1' incidents are incidents which pose a threat to health and safety. The station must be made safe within 4 hours of the incident being reported. 'Severity 1' incidents are reported directly to the Site Host, as well as to our Head of Operations.
Within 48 hours, the Site Host must communicate their remediation plan to us. As a maintenance partner, your obligation is to assist the Site Host in meeting our Terms and Conditions to the best of your ability.
'Severity 2' incidents
Less-urgent incidents usually fall into the category of a faulty, inoperable or underperforming connector, or a station losing network connectivity with Chargefox. Incidents impact the availability of the station and, as a result, a decrease in usage and revenue for the Site host.
Often, these incidents are intermittent and stations will self-heal. Our team analyses the incident notifications received for a station across the various channels of our platform. When a pattern emerges, we will raise a new incident detailing station behaviour over time. This ticket is sent to both the Incident Contact and Site Host, and carries the same 30-day SLA.
Please ensure that you communicate your remediation plan to both the Site Host and Chargefox, and keep us updated throughout the process.
Scheduled downtime
Should you need to make a site visit and take a station offline for repair, Chargefox can apply a 'scheduled downtime' window to the station. This will communicate to drivers that the station is under maintenance, via the Chargefox app. During a scheduled downtime period, the station will not send automated incident notifications.
Please let your Site Host know that this feature is available to them.
Public notes
Site Hosts are able to add 'public notes' to their stations to communicate with drivers via the Chargefox app. If an issue is known, and a remediation plan is in place for a station, please advise your Site Host to add a 'public note' to the station to tell drivers when to expect the station to be back online.
Network outages
Occasionally, network outages occur that affect multiple stations. We will endeavour to notify Site Hosts of these outages as they occur. If you would like to be notified of network outages, please subscribe to Chargefox Statuspage updates.