For Site hosts: Information and processes for 'offline', 'fault', 'user-generated' and 'call-centre' incidents
Offline or Fault incidents
Types of Incidents
Chargefox creates incidents of two types - offline incidents and fault incidents.
Incidents are associated with stations.
Offline incidents are created when the Chargefox system is not able to successfully communicate with the station. This could be attributed to many causes, including loss of comms or power.
Fault incidents are created when the Chargefox system receives OCPP messages from the station outlining a fault that impacts the use of a station or connector, such that it is not able to be used to charge.
Status
When a station has an offline incident, the status will show as 'offline' or 'out of order' or 'unavailable'. No connectors will be able to be used to charge at stations with these statuses.
When a station has a fault incident, the status of one or many connectors at the station may be affected. If a connector is not able to be used to charge it will show as 'faulted'
When a location, that can have one or many stations, has no connectors available at any stations it will change colour on the Chargefox map to grey (from orange).
Reportable Incidents
Many incidents are self-resolving, in that they do not persist over time.
To ensure Chargefox only sends those persisting incidents, we apply a snooze time period to all new incidents, after which we send nominated email addresses incident notifications - this can also include nominated email addresses from maintenance partners.
When an incident passes the snooze period, we call it 'reportable'.
The default snooze periods are
- 15 minutes for fault-type incidents
- 30 minutes for offline incidents
Snooze periods can be customised by organisation.
Please refer to our Site Host Terms and Conditions for the maintenance requirements and responsibilities you have as a Site host.
Note: If you're a beta user, you'll be able to see fluctuations/offline incidents that are not reportable on the Incidents page in the Chargefox portal.
Email notifications
When an incident is reportable, email notifications will be generated.
You may wish to nominate a specific maintenance contacts. All Site Host Admins will receive the notifications if a specific contact isn't nominated.
For offline incidents, emails will follow this format
For fault incidents, emails will follow this format - note the inclusion of OEM fault codes received by OCPP messages
When an incident is resolved, emails will follow this format
User-generated incidents
User-generated incidents
A third type of incident is used to collect evidence from drivers using the Chargefox network.
At every public location on the network, we allow users to report issues based on
- station
- issue type
- free text field (message)
Escalation of user-generated incidents
While these incidents are never reportable, per section 1, they will motivate the operations team to look into issues at the station or raise ad hoc comms with the owner of the staton and their maintenance partner. This could result in a station or connectors status being manually shown as out of order or unavailable.
Note: If you're a beta user, you'll be able to see user-reported incidents on the Incidents page in the Chargefox portal.
Driver communications
If drivers raise issues that require replies or further communications, the user-generated incident will create an email thread that is integrated with our customer support system (Zendesk), so that Chargefox can store and manage the history of issues and details of those issues.
Call centre
Escalation of call centre issues
While these issues are never reportable, per section 1, they will motivate the operations team to look into issues at the station or raise ad hoc comms with the owner of the station and their maintenance partner. This could result in a station or connectors status being manually shown as out of order or unavailable.
Public notes
You can add 'public notes' to your 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 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 nation-wide. We will endeavour to notify you of these outages as they occur. Please subscribe to Chargefox Statuspage updates for network outage notifications.