The Planet Blog

The Planet has five core values. We are quizzed about them at companywide meetings, and they permeate our daily operations. I recently came across a passage when rereading “The Art of War” that may serve as a secondary set of core values for the team that handles The Planet’s new Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers offering:

Now there are five matters to which a general must pay strict heed. The first of these is administration; the second, preparedness; the third, determination; the fourth, prudence; and the fifth, economy.
– Wu Ch’i (430 – 381 BC)

Each one of the elements Wu mentions can be interpreted differently depending on the situation. Given that I work with the team that recently launched Alpha Professional, I can’t help but draw parallels. If you missed our press release on January 12, let me recap this new service offering:

Staffed around the clock (24×7) by dedicated and certified (RHCE, MCSE, CCNA) system administrators, The Planet has created a new business-class service offering that our clients have been asking for. The Alpha Professional feature set includes:

• First-call resolution: When you need a certified team of experts to take personal ownership of support incidents for your most important servers, Alpha Professional is ready to respond. You make one call, and the issue is resolved.
• One-hour hardware replacement Service Level Agreement (SLA): The Planet’s one-hour hardware replacement SLA provides you with peace of mind. If your server or any of its hardware components fail, we will replace them within one hour.
• Managed Backup: If you require a restore or you’d like to modify your backup scheduling, our team is available to assist you around the clock. Twenty GBs of high-availability redundant storage is included with Alpha Professional, and plug-ins for MySQL, Microsoft SQL, Exchange and SharePoint are available at no additional cost.
• Server Monitoring and Reaction: Our team of monitoring engineers is constantly on standby, watching for service notifications from your server. If a critical fault is detected any time of day, they immediately jump into action to resolve the service issue. In the event the service issue is lasting longer than anticipated, our team will reach out to your designated contact(s) to provide updates and guidance on a correct course of action and ETA on a resolution.

The Alpha Professional service package is available on virtual and private racks or on a per-server basis at $125 per server per month, so you can buy the service for the servers that are critical to your business. Other hosting providers require this kind of coverage on your entire installation, but we understand that you might not need us to monitor or run regular backups on your sandbox environments or your development servers, so you shouldn’t be required to add the service to those servers if it doesn’t fit your needs.

Managed Dedicated Servers or Managed Hosting?

So now we have Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers and Managed Hosting. They are two very distinct offerings linked by the generic-yet-fitting-in-both-cases term “managed” in their names. Managed Dedicated Servers is focused on your infrastructure. Managed Hosting is focused on your environment.

Managed Dedicated Servers ensure the uptime of your critical hosting infrastructure — including servers, firewalls, load balancers, etc. — and we allow you to manage everything from the operating system up.

Managed Hosting is a complete soup-to-nuts service offering in which your dedicated team has an intimate knowledge of your applications and databases. The Planet’s team will maintain a continuous conversation with you to tweak your systems, scale your installation and plan for the future. If you have database issues or you find your application is loading slowly, the Managed Hosting team will work through these issues with you. For a complete side-by-side breakdown of features by service type, visit http://www.theplanet.com/hosting-services/.

If you haven’t done so already, you can find complete information on Alpha Professional Managed Dedicated Servers at http://www.theplanet.com/managed-dedicated-server/.

-Todd

A couple of weeks ago, Flora posted a few questions in the comments section of our Call Calibration blog and asked for more information on our call-monitoring process: “I’m interested to know more about calibration and call monitoring. When representatives are appraised by different appraisers, how to ensure fairness? How to eliminate the effect of subjectiveness [sic] in call monitoring?”

As the Contact Center QA manager, fairness is always a main concern for me, so I’d like to take a few minutes to share a little more about how we’ve set up our system.

In the Call Calibration blog, you got a glimpse of what happens during our weekly calibration meetings: The management staff, supervisors, team leads and randomly selected agents monitor and review a sample selection of calls. We discuss the call, and each team member shares their view on how they interpreted the customer-agent interaction. The call is reviewed from a process-and-procedure viewpoint, measuring how it impacts customer satisfaction.

Subjectivity in call monitoring takes two distinct forms: the subjective goals when working with each customer and the subjectivity inherent in peer reviews of performance. The question of the qualitative or subjective aspects in each call is very important: An agent can hit all the points on the evaluation form and the customer’s needs may still not be fully met. Our goal is to satisfy our customers, and if we aren’t hitting that goal with these objective metrics, these sessions are counterproductive. As such, our call calibration grading sheets have evolved over the course of our reviews, acknowledging the importance of — and the subjectivity inherent in — one-on-one interaction.

For instance, empathy is probably the most subjective quality of a call, so we needed to learn the best ways to “grade” when is a call truly sincere and when it sounds forced and unattached. Is there an objective way to ensure this subjective goal is met? We want to move beyond responses such as, “I’m sorry to hear that,” to responses like, “I’m very sorry to hear that you are experiencing X issue. Let me see what I can do to help.” We work with all of our agents to get their input on the most organic, genuine ways to communicate help to our customers, and as we create these hosting call-center best practices, we get additional feedback that helps us build and shape the way we run our organization.

We know that it’s impossible to separate reviewers from their relationships with the agents being graded, so subjectivity will always be an implicit part of the review process. We’ve made the environment very positive, and we follow up with each individual reviewer after our calibration sessions if his or her perception of the call differs from others. Even on the calls scored very poorly, the agents being reviewed should never feel like they are being picked on or talked down to … Every review offers an opportunity to learn how to perform better — it’s not intended to harp on what was done wrong.

When we first introduced the calibration program, there were supervisors who did not want their teams monitored. The fingers always pointed to someone else’s team, and no one really wanted to hear what they did wrong on a given call. By making these calibration sessions much more casual and positive, the tide turned, and agents are now anxious to be selected for review. We made sure to establish the underlying objective of how our interactions affect The Planet’s overall customer experience, and that team-centric goal goes a long way in opening everyone to feedback and criticism.

Calibration is fun now. It’s an engaging process showing us how we did from the customer’s standpoint at the end of the day. If you have any additional questions about the call calibration process, please let us know!

-Arthur

You’ve just rolled out a new version of your software for download, and the announcement hits the front page of Digg. You added a few new products, and they’re flying off your Web site’s virtual shelves. Your forums have reached record numbers of visitors the last four days straight. You are living the dream: You’re an Internet success. You treat yourself to a celebratory dinner and fall into a deep, contented sleep.

When you wake up, the sun isn’t shining and the birds aren’t chirping — your cell phone pierces the serenity of the night, and you answer, only to be treated to an exasperated monologue from your CEO, who says something to the effect of, “The Internet on our site is broken.”

Your site crashed an hour after your head hit the pillow, and the fields of green you painted in your dreams are immediately transformed into desolate wastelands of headache and heartache. You lost sales and visitors, and your online reputation took a hit … it’s all too much to think about. You wonder how this could have happened. You wonder why you didn’t get any alerts about the IP address not responding to pings. You wonder why your other sites and servers on the same rack were not affected. You wonder what you could have done differently.

If you’ve been in a similar position before, you can vividly recall the pain. If you haven’t been in a similar position, trust me … it’s not any fun. I ran a Web hosting company in college and occasionally the server would go down at 4 a.m. I’d wake up the next day to find a slew of angry customer e-mails. I desperately needed to monitor individual services on our servers, beyond whether or not the server is still responding to pings. So as I began to specialize in server management and support, I made sure my team focused on creating and maintaining a monitoring service to keep the horror story you just read from ever happening to our customers. The Planet Alpha Server Monitoring service was born.

Why AS Monitoring?

What are the advantages of Alpha Server Monitoring over standard server monitoring like IPAlert? IPAlert only provides e-mail and SMS notifications for down servers. Alpha Server Monitoring checks individual services on machines to make sure they are responding to requests and opening sockets, and it generally verifies service performance rather than its existence. Then, a highly trained Advanced Services administrator investigates the issue and takes corrective action.

We have a dedicated staff of 11 Systems Administrators who keep a vigilant eye on servers 24×7x365. Many of these SysAdmins have been in the hosting industry since before you could really consider hosting an industry, so our Advanced Services team has an exceptional amount of experience, from answering straightforward technical support requests to researching and solving complex problems.

How Does AS Monitoring Work?

Our custom monitoring system will check up to 15 services on your machine every five minutes. If there are any unresponsive services, your server will be flagged on our system. Our Systems Administrators will respond promptly with a service restart, server reboot, or we can follow a custom response procedure as you request or as needed.

Instead of losing sleep at night, worried about getting another frantic call from your CEO, you can rest assured knowing that the Alpha Advanced Services team is watching your server. With Alpha Server Monitoring, your night might look like this:

2 a.m. You finish coding and post your new update after a 22-hour marathon session. You go to bed.
3 a.m. The server starts to slow down and becomes unresponsive following a huge surge of traffic when you hit the front page of Digg.
3:03 a.m. Your server is checked by the Alpha Server Monitoring system, and an “HTTP down” alert is created because services are not responding as expected.
3:08 a.m. An Advanced Services Systems Administrator investigates an “HTTP down” alert.
3:12 a.m. The administrator finds that your MySQL database server and Apache have crashed so he restarts them both.
3:13 a.m. Your site is back online and responsive.
10 a.m. You wake up from your coding-induced coma to find a whole bucket of new orders to process and an Orbit ticket telling you what happened and what the Advanced Services team did about it.

Alpha Server Monitoring: Guaranteeing your uptime, sleep and sanity.

-Sean

P.S. We’re running a great promotion on Advanced Services right now: try any service on your servers for FREE for the first month.