Upgraded: The Planet’s HQ2
January 10, 2008 by Kevin Hazard, Web Hosting Evangelist in Evangelist's Corner, The Planet
As promised, I’ve got a few pictures for you contrasting our upgraded workplace with our old offices. Doug explained why we made the transition to a new, consolidated office, so you can consider this post a continuation on how we’ve changed our work environment to advance The Planet’s pursuit of providing the best customer experience in the industry.
Jimi Hendrix once said in an interview, “In order to change the world, you have to get your head together first.” I could creatively weave in a “the world/ The Planet” pun, but I’ll spare you the cheesinesses and simply show you some of the ways the move has upgraded our work environment, enabling us to provide better service.
The Call Center
If you’re speaking with Billing, Technical Support, or Abuse, you are probably talking to someone in this room. In the new call center, the screens in the front of the room show statistics like real-time ticket counts and statuses, call lengths and hold times, live chat requests, and quality assurance statistics like support ratings, escalations, and new policies.
The Network Operations Center
If you have a chance to swing through Houston to visit us, the new Network Operations Center will probably catch your eye. You’ll see the NOC staff hard at work under a blue glow with its new nine-workstation, stadium-seating configuration (above right). It faces nine monitors with switchable sources that track various statistics and status reports over time. As you can see in the old NOC (above left), everyone worked along a single aisle in the middle of the room, so the monitors on the back wall were behind half of the staff . With the new configuration, everyone can keep an eye on the monitors and respond to notifications accordingly.
In the near future, I’ll sit down with The Planet’s new VP of Network Operations Stan Barber to explain the NOC’s role in The Planet’s day-to-day service (like monitoring and filtering DoS and DDoS attacks, tracking and notifying customers about the network status, and addressing network-affecting issues).
The Cubes
The picture shows the sales area to show the general contrast between the old (above left) and new (above right) work spaces. Lower partition walls, higher ceilings and quad-cubes make collaborating a lot easier, and it’s much more conducive to me throwing a Nerf ball at Kevin Landreth.
Did I forget anything? … Oh yeah:
The People
Smiling faces. It looks like I don’t have to report any unhappy employees to Doug. 
Because a few of you have asked for more on the other areas in which we are investing, I will have a new post for you soon about The Planet’s most recent data center and network improvements and retrofits; the company-sponsored education and certification programs in Technical Support and the Network Operations Center; and our investments in new server hardware.
-Kevin
January 10th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Just FYI, the new offices are awesome. And for the record: He has never actually hit me with the nerf ball. My guess is he’s never played scorched earth or Scorch3D. Keep up the good work Kevin, one day you’ll be as awesome as me
January 11th, 2008 at 11:06 am
I used to host a mirror for scorched earth. Good times.
January 14th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
The new offices look great. Glad to know that it is more conducive for Nerf Football! Anxious to see the new pics of the Data Center as well.
January 23rd, 2008 at 5:46 pm
UPDATE: Kevin finally was able to hit me with the nerf ball after about 107 failures. Cudos for his dedication.
You are closer to being more awesome, but still not as awesome as me
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