Service Untitled

Not too long ago I worked with a company that had to signup a few hundred people n a couple of hours (in person). Since the company has been doing this process every year for some number of years, they’ve had a chance to refine and improve it over time. The setup and the process they have is pretty interesting.

First of all, everyone is mailed a packet before they arrive. The packet has all the paperwork, a checklist, and all of the information they need. It’s kept pretty simple and the packet is constantly revised and simplified. The point is to have as much stuff completed before the people come to the physical location to actually complete the registration process.

Once they’re on site, they wait in line in a big room. There is an employee near the front of the line who directs people waiting in line to the processing people as they become available. If the person needing to have his or her paperwork processed is “special” for one reason or another (about 15% of people need to have some extra paperwork for one reason or another), then they’re directed to a person who specializes in that.

The nifty thing about the process is that the people the company knows are going to be unique cases have a different color folder. That way, the employee directing people knows right away if the next person in line is going to need to see the specialist or if that person can just go to one of the other processing people. All employees knows a little bit about the particular person by the color of his or her folder. It’s a simple way to ensure that people that will need to be there longer or have more complicated circumstances are directed to the right place.

This sort of process and thinking can obviously be applied elsewhere. Employees can give new customers, new employees, consultants, VIP customers, etc. to tell them apart from the normal person working or visiting the office. It’s just a simple way of thinking and working that can make a big difference (much like the clipboard system I talked about recently).

Twitter is the poster child of Web 2.0. It’s pretty hip, it’s innovative, it’s grown exponentially, and despite having no clear business model, is considered to be extremely successful. I don’t use Twitter personally, but I know plenty of people that do, and most of them like the service a lot. One of the biggest criticisms of the product, though, is that its reliability is shaky at best.

Critics and the company itself have blamed the relibality issues on different things. Some say its because the site uses Ruby (a programming framework), others say it is because the site’s infastructure isn’t well designed, and others just say the site has been growing too fast for any team to keep up with. All of the issues have their respective truths, but what is more interesting to me as a customer service person is how they’ve responded and handled their issues of downtime.

The word is that Twitter used to be okay at best when it came to responding to feedback and criticism. However, the company has recently gotten a lot better. They’ve gotten so good that journalists and users have been openly applauding the company for being so responsive. Even, the often negative TechCrunch said in a recent post that Twitter “continues to be annoyingly and constructively responsive to criticism.”

If you read Twitter’s response to TechCrunch’s questions, the commentary makes sense; Twitter has been very responsive and they’ve been doing a great job at it.

First of all, Twitter admits their faults and says positive changes are coming soon. By saying “we know it is not correct and we’re changing that,” and explaining how they are changing that (by bringing on quite a experienced engineers to their team), they’re covering a major issue right there. Once they address those important issues, they answer TechCrunch’s specific questions with pretty good answers. They don’t get too technical (they got a little more technical in another post), but they do answer the questions and address how they’re going to move forward.

Twitter also has a status web site that shows the company is serious about their uptime as well as about being open and transparent. The status page contains updates and useful links (including a link to a third-party uptime monitoring service). It is just an additional level of transparency that makes the company seem even more open and responsive to downtime.

Twitter has done a great job at responding to feedback and keeping a positive image. A lot of companies can learn a lot from Twitter’s actions when dealing with these issues.

Technorati Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Outage, Twitter

The web hosting industry is a tough industry. There an infinite number of potential technical problems that can occur, ruthless competition, somewhat low margins, and then to top it off, trucks and explosions.

San Antonio, Texas-based Rackspace dealt with a truck knocking its power out (and subsequently quite a few servers). Most recently, though, The Planet (another large dedicated hosting company and an indirect competitor of Rackspace), had a portion of their datacenter explode.

The cause of The Planet’s issues are fairly simple: an electrical system shorted and caught on fire. The fire caused an explosion that “knocked down three walls” that surrounded the datanceter’s electrical equipment room. The power for most of the datacenter then went out. The fire department, after inspection the damage, told The Planet that they were not allowed to turn on their backup generators for safety concerns. 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers were affected. Needless to say, it was a large outage.

The company started responding and posting updates almost immediately on their forums. The first significant update came about four hours after the incident was first mentioned. An hour after the incident was first reported, employees promised to post updates every 15 minutes on the forums (a promise they kept for the most part).

Something The Planet did really well was keep up with the updates. Even if they had to post “there are no additional updates at this time,” they still kept their customers in the loop. The company then developed a plan of action and reminded customers that they fully intended to keep to their SLA promises and commitments. As it got later into the night, the company started posting updates less frequently, but they never stopped posting updates. They brought in additional teams and support technicians to help fix the problems and man the phones. 28 hours after the issue first occurred, the company’s CEO posted an update on the forums that briefly and effectively communicated what was going on and what was going to happen.

I really liked how The Planet communicated their priorities (restoring service) very clearly. I also like how they provided updates every 15 minutes while they were learning about the issue and what it meant for customers. Their temporary web site was effective at providing updates as well.

While still keeping what they did do well in mind, The Planet also did some things I did not particularly care for. Posting about sales and promotions while a good portion of a large datacenter is down is inappropriate. That has the potential to annoy a lot of customers and I’m sure the company can afford to hold off for a day or two on the promotions. The company’s official blog has yet to mention the outage. Their web site doesn’t talk about it, either. More importantly, neither of them mentioned the outage while it was still happening (all services were fully restored as of a few hours ago).

Overall, the company handled the issue well. What The Planet does over the next few days will determine what a lot of customers and a lot of the web hosting industry thinks of the company.

Technorati Tags: Communication, Customer Service, Outage, Updates, Rackspace, The Planet