Non-verbal communication is becoming more and more a way of life in the customer service industry. In customer contact centers once dominated by phone calls, companies now communicate with customers via web chat, e-mail and ticketing systems.

Obviously, the technology industry has been at the forefront of this type of direct communication, with customers often placing more trust in these alternate methods than the traditional “give ‘em a call” approach.

Resolving problems with a ticketing system creates an entirely different support management paradigm than answering a phone call. Issues can be tracked and researched via the written record that exists in a ticket, but tickets don’t have the immediate feedback of a phone call. Because the vast majority of our support is handled through tickets, here’s a glimpse at the inner-workings of our support process.

When The Planet receives a customer ticket, the first thing that we do is conduct a “triage” to determine the problem that has been described and which department should take ownership. We have a staff of triage experts who do their best to insure that a ticket is routed to the right department as soon as it is received.

To avoid being “stuck in the slow lane,” give us as much detail as possible when you submit a ticket. While we can work with “my bandwidth is wrong” or “my server isn’t working,” advising us that different software showed a different amount of bandwidth traffic or that you can’t connect to your server will help us route tickets to the right department much more quickly. Give us as much detail as you can about the problem, and chances are we can resolve the problem more quickly.

Sometimes, ticket processing can be slowed when we request additional information from you by updating the ticket. If you have an open ticket, it’s important to keep an eye on it to see if we’ve asked for new information that will help us keep your account secure and resolve the issue. For us, there is nothing worse than missing one last piece of the puzzle, so we are often as anxious to hear back from you as you are to hear back from us.

When you do submit a ticket, there is a level of trust involved that we ARE working on it. It’s true that some take longer than others to process; it’s the nature of the customer service in technology. Resolving an incorrect server charge on your account will probably take less time than figuring out why a server won’t reboot, and it is our responsibility to keep you in the loop, so we have multiple systems in place to do so. Each department escalates tickets to higher priority levels when a ticket has been open too long without an update. We strictly adhere to these limits and take action when ticket times exceed our set warning levels. Our support managers are constantly updated in real time on the pending time to process all tickets we receive, and our support reps work diligently to get responses and resolutions to every ticket as quickly as possible. In the most complex tickets, cross-departmental communication or the need for additional research may keep us from resolving the individual tickets as quickly as we would like, but without these behind-the-scenes steps, we would not be giving you the best answer.

Moral of the Story: To keep your ticket humming along in the fast lane, please include as much detail as possible in your initial ticket and keep an eye out for requests for additional information. Please be patient as we work to resolve more difficult problems, and always feel free to request updates. We pay attention to comments made by our customers regarding the ticketing system, and we are always looking for ways to improve our work-flow and enhance the customer experience.

Keep this post in mind when (or should I say “if”?) you need to submit a new ticket so you can keep your tickets in the fast lane!

-John

“Uh, I’m going to have to ask you to move your desk. Now, if you could get it to go as far back against that wall as possible, that would be great … that way, we’ll have some room for more boxes and things we need to put in here.” The movie Office Space had me at “Hello, Peter,” but that quote is one of my favorites in the movie. As I mentioned in my previous post about The Planet Day, we are working on our own Office Space.

Literally.

Today, we held the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new building, and I snapped a few pictures around the new Bayou Place location to give everyone a glimpse of the new digs. I’ll wait until next week for all of the Houston folks to get settled before I post an extended tour featuring all of the departments in candid “at work” photos … once you get through this post, you’ll probably want a little breather before the next wave of pictures, anyway.

If anyone gets lost as we meander through the halls, keep this map with you. We’d ask that you not leave any breadcrumbs to track your location 1) because it didn’t really work out for Hansel and Gretel and 2) because you’d mess up our new carpet.

As you get off the elevator outside of our office, you are greeted by The Planet’s logo over the tall sliding-glass doors in the floor-to-ceiling glass entryway.

Similar to the way your parents used to mark the inside of your clothes with your initials, we wanted to mark the walls to be sure we wouldn’t misplace the office. If found, return to the corner of Capitol and Bagby in downtown Houston.

The eye in the sky. Don’t worry … I didn’t hurt myself scaling the walls and hanging from the ceiling to snap pictures of a few of the faces as Doug gave his opening remarks to welcome everyone to the new building. Rather than make me risk life and limb, Doug had the builders create a catwalk for me.

Well, the catwalk might not have been build just for me … the Bayou Place building formerly housed Houston’s convention center with significant amount of the vertical space. Rather than letting that space go to waste, Doug worked with the builders to create about 10,000 square feet of usable space “floating” 20 feet above the rest of the office.

This is a picture of the “park” along the catwalk. Remember, none of this existed as of a few months ago. Notice the vintage rocking chairs and beautiful foliage.

Meet my new best friend. The superstar in this picture is a Starbucks-capable espresso/coffee machine. This will be one of the last times anyone will see this area empty … it was designed to accommodate quite a few folks. If you can’t find a seat on the counter, turn 90 degrees to your left and you’ll see:

Now you can lay your fears of drinking your coffee while standing to rest (pun intended). This raised area is accessible by two sets of stairs and an elevator. And in addition to the park, the lounge and the kitchen, we have three large conference rooms.

We’re ten pictures deep into the post, and you really haven’t seen any work spaces yet. Getting a sense of the grandeur yet?

Back to the Open House. For the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Doug welcomed 275 employees and guests with his vision for the new office:

• Consolidate our Houston folks in one location (with the exception of the data center techs at each respective DC).
• Attract new talent to join our growing team.
• Foster better relationships between departments.
• Create a fun, interactive work environment to generate out-of-the-box thinking about how we can provide even better products and services to our customers.

I’ll dive deeper into these points with Doug within the next few posts. On another side-note, we consolidated all of our non-DC offices in Dallas to our D2/D6 facility last week for the same reason as the consolidation in Houston. We’ve got a lot of great expectations for both cities as a result of these moves.

Doug invited Howard Park from GI Partners and Walter Ulrich from Houston Technology Center to share a few words. Howard thanked everyone for the hard work they have put into The Planet over the past year and a half, and he says he expects even greater results now that we’re in the new location.

Walter explained the mission of Houston Technology Center, and thanked The Planet for its continued involvement in incubating technology entrepreneurship in Houston. We also presented HTC with a donation of $25,000, as gold sponsors for the 2008 Web-Based Business School they run for entrepreneurs. They teach these budding business owners about marketing, design, legal issues, sales and emerging trends in the business landscape. We will be in an ongoing relationship to build this area’s reputation to rival that of the Silicon Valley in the next six years.

Our Houston Network Operations Center is hiding there in the background. I’ll save the detailed pictures of that space for a future post, though.

It has taken a lot of sweat and elbow grease to get the new office into shape, and this t-shirt gives you an idea how many companies have been involved. We can’t thank everyone enough for the work they’ve contributed … the end result is simply spectacular.

In my next post, I’ll show you around the work areas to compare and contrast what we are moving from to what we are moving to. I might even have a few pictures of how far this office space has come in the past few months.

Stay tuned.

-Kevin

Put on your party hats, lace up your dancing shoes, and line up at the punch bowl. It’s officially The Planet Day in Houston, Texas! To celebrate our move to Bayou Place in downtown Houston, the Mayor of the City of Houston proclaimed:

The Planet is the world’s largest privately held dedicated hosting company. The company provides IT infrastructure solutions to more than 22,000 small and medium-size businesses and hosts 3.1 million Web sites worldwide. The Planet offers the best choice of servers, software tools and world-class support, and is backed by state-of-the-art facilities and unmatched network connectivity. The Planet helps turn information technology into a powerful competitive advantage that enables companies to successfully grow their businesses.

Headquartered in Houston, and with additional data centers and offices in Dallas, The Planet’s move represents a significant step in the company’s growth, bringing together in a single location a broad base of operations under one roof.

To commemorate this important day in its history, The Planet is making a generous contribution to the Houston Technology Center, which further underscores its commitment to the HTC mission and to the technology community in our city.

On December 12, 2007, The Planet will host its Grand Opening at Bayou Place. On this auspicious occasion The City of Houston extends best wishes for a successful and rewarding event.

Therefore, I, Bill White, Mayor of the City of Houston, hereby proclaim December 12, 2007, as

The Planet Day

in Houston, Texas.

Here’s an updated picture of the proclamation. Click the image for a larger view.

Needless to say, our team is excited to celebrate this holiday! We’ve got a ribbon-cutting ceremony this afternoon, and we are in the process of preparing our two Houston offices to be consolidated into the new location this weekend so we can hit the ground running next Monday morning.

Our office tours in Houston and in Dallas are still among the most viewed posts on our blog, so I’ll add another tour post to the collection with pictures from the new building within the next day or two.

-Kevin

At The Planet, we’re excited about the holiday season. We’ve had a great year, so this is a perfect time to look back on 2007 and store away the memories much like one would store server backups in our data centers. How’s that that for a convenient segue into a discussion about The Planet’s backup solutions?

We currently offer NAS, DiskSync, Dedicated SAN and Dedicated Backup Server options, and as the resident backup and storage guru on the Product Management team, I love sharing backup knowledge with our customers. What question do I get most often? Easy: What is the difference between

What is the difference between NAS, DiskSync and the Dedicated Backup Server?

NAS (Network Attached Storage) is storage space allows you access over FTP. You write or provide the software to create and send backups to your NAS, and it functions as a reliable external disk to protect your data and store information separate from your server. Think of it as a target disc, albeit a pretty small one. You can buy NAS space from The Planet in increments ranging from 20GB to 200GB, and our typical NAS setup accommodates many users on each of our available NAS devices.

Our DiskSync product offers a much more complete SAN (Storage Area Network) infrastructure backup solution with the ability to schedule full backups and perform restores in our managed environment. Rather than having to create the backup software, our DiskSync solution enables you to quickly and easily monitor and track your data backups. On the infrastructure side, we host the large storage network and maintain the integrity of all DiskSync user data. The SAN structure is significantly larger than a NAS device and is much more scalable. It’s able to accommodate a considerably higher number of DiskSync users and any additional space you may want or need. DiskSync backups are available in 10GB increments with unlimited capacity.

With our new Dedicated Backup Server (DBS) solution, you become the admin for the entire system. You get a dedicated server with the R1Soft CDP Server software/license installed, and full root access. You have the ability to manage backups and delegate authority to users and sub-users, and you manage the OS, which allows for true customization for any of your more complex backup needs. We’ve found that many customers want this complete control and the peace of mind that each DBS is individually encrypted for data security since no other users access your DBS. Our most popular Dedicated Backup Servers come equipped with 500GB, 1TB and 1.5TB of data, but we’re always open to a challenge if you need more.

While that’s a quick rundown of our three main backup solutions, it succinctly explains a few of the key differences I like to communicate when asked to run through the options. We feel this array of products can meet the needs of almost any user, so if you have additional questions about backup solution implementation or if you would just like a little more information, visit our Backup page or post a quick comment to let me know.

-Brett