The Planet Blog

One of the biggest benefits of outsourcing your IT infrastructure is that you don’t have to be anywhere near it to take full advantage of it. The inherent benefit of not having to be near your servers is that you can sleep a little more peacefully every night, knowing we’re keeping an eye on your equipment. If you want proof, ask the more than 44 percent of our customer base that are located outside North America.

Unfortunately, given the fact that you aren’t close to your server, it’s not uncommon to feel a little “disconnected” from your hardware … You don’t get the warm-and-fuzzy feelings from seeing your specific server on its rack or giving it a hug when it processes a big sale. Maybe that’s why a huge percentage of small- and medium-sized businesses have not outsourced their infrastructure needs: Their “server room” (or “closet” in real estate terms) may not be enterprise-level, but at least they can step “behind the curtain” and see their servers in action if they have the urge.

Naturally, we thought it might be fun to offset some of that “disconnection”:

While this tweet may have just been a thought in passing this morning, the flood of responses and ReTweets coming from that post suggest there’s a healthy demand for some “show me my servers in real life” love, so we’re going to make that happen.

At some point in the next week, we will post a tweet on The Planet’s Twitter page with instructions on how you can get a picture taken of your very own server/rack. We’ll even include your Twitter username on a namecard so you know it’s yours.

This is going to be a limited-time, limited-availability opportunity, and you might have to work to get on the list, but the payoff will be more than worth the effort: a picture of your server that you can print out, frame and hang above your monitor. It’s a chance for you to own a picture of your Web site in its unprocessed form.

Stay tuned and be ready.

-Kevin

Hi there. Laurence Simon here. I work in The Planet’s call center. I do triage on weekday mornings, sweeping the ticket queues and picking off calls. Nice to meet ya.

You know, all things considered, it’s rather nice in here. Good ambient light, and there’s a great view of Buffalo Bayou and the Ferris wheel at the Downtown Aquarium. The chairs are pretty comfortable. And, I. Love. The Tunnels. (I highly recommend Treebeards‘ red beans and rice.)

However, there’s one thing that irks me: While we work 24/7, 365 days a year (or 366 this year!), come hurricane or hot air from the folks on television getting us all worked up over named storms, we can still make your experience even better.

I talked with my fellow trench-mates (pictured below), cobbled together a few notes, and jotted down a few suggestions, tips and thoughts that can give you a better, faster and more efficient experience with Technical Support:

1. Reboots

It takes just as long to set up a Manual Reboot Request (MRR) as it does to submit a trouble ticket or call in a reboot request when you’re at a computer. If you need a reboot for a server, use the ROD/Remote Reboot functions. If that fails, then use the Manual Reboot Request. You’ll see much quicker results this way.

Submitting a normal ticket with “Please reboot my server” requires that a technician go into Orbit, submit a reboot request for you, and then close out the original ticket. It takes much longer to get a server rebooted this way than by using ROD or Manual.

2. Initial Setup

The first thing you should do with your server is set the hostname, get that hostname resolving in DNS, and then request it as the Reverse DNS. This will prevent a lot of common network issues from the get-go.

The hostname should be a fully qualified domain name that points to the server. For example: server.exampledomain.com.

To get a Reverse DNS entry set up, just submit a trouble ticket with Reverse DNS as the subject line or a DNS Change Ticket. Make sure to include the IP address and the hostname you want to point it at.

3. Escalation Procedures

Prepare and post a set of escalation procedures for common situations so that we don’t need to ask you to perform basic recovery tasks.

Let us know in advance what to do if an alert comes up and the server requires a reboot, if it is OK to run an FSCK on the drive when it’s needed, or to replace failed drives the moment they lock up.

4. Readily Accessible Information

Keep a card with your account number and password — with bogus characters — handy in case you’re away from your desk.

For instance, if your password is:

1L0v3Kev1nH4z4rd

Besides the fact that you’ve got some serious issues to work through (or the fact that you are actually Kevin Hazard), you can bogus this up with some XJQP magic…

x1L0jv3Keqv1nH4zp4rd

If someone steals your wallet, they won’t have the actual password. Just remember to remove the X, J, Q and P characters and you have your password.

For additional security, you can require that we ask a security question, like your mother’s maiden name. That’ll also throw off anyone who gets a hold of the account.

5. Keep a Calendar

Keep a wall calendar handy with reminders when SSLs and domains are up for renewal. Also, program them as appointment reminders in your cell phone.

A multimillion-dollar operation can be brought to its knees for a day when its domain expires. Renew it for as long in advance as you can afford, and be sure to keep the account information for logging into your registrar handy. (Or, if you want to make sure it’s all in one place, make The Planet your domain registrar.)

(NOTE: According to Whois, ilovekevinhazard.com is available)

6. Notification Address

Do not set your notification address to one on your server. When you use an external contact address, you can get updates when the server’s down or if there is an abuse or legal issue.

If you lost your cell phone, you wouldn’t want people calling your cell phone to tell you they’ve found your cell phone, right?

Be sure to check that mailbox frequently, or have it alert you.

7. Up to Date

Keep all your contact information up to date. This tip is a continuation of No. 6, but it’s important enough to reiterate on its own.

8. Plan Ahead

If I were to tell you, “Your server is down and we cannot recover any data off of it,” what would you do?

Disaster planning and testing your recovery procedure on a regular basis is critical to any online business. Spending some time and money with our sales department exploring backup and redundancy will prevent you from losing clients, money and sleep.

As I like to say, “Terminator 2: Judgment Day was just a big advertisement for offsite backups.”

9. Cut out the Middle Man

Simple changes to the A Records of DNS entries can be done in Orbit instead of via a ticket.

Just go to DNS Administration, bring up the domain, make the changes, and save them.

This is actually easier to do than submitting a ticket requesting the change, and it’s a lot quicker.

10. Help Us Help You

Keep your passwords updated in Orbit and let us know what port SSH is listening to. Include any wheel users or special instructions for login.

This will save us time in addressing your issue because it will let us get into your server the moment we get the ticket.

It’s like keeping a key in a fake rock in the garden so the neighbor can feed your cat (or James Caan if you’ve got a Kathy Bates Misery thing going on).

11. Firewalled

If you have a firewall, please allow the Technical Support group access to your server.

It’s important to have a firewall on your server for security purposes, whether it’s one of our dedicated external firewall products or just a set of iptables or Windows Defender. But it’s also important that we are able to access your server quickly should you raise the alarm.

12. Be Specific

Please make the ticket summaries descriptive and unambiguous. “Help!” and “Urgent!” and “I am losing my business!” make it difficult to quickly assign issues. After the issue is resolved, they also don’t help us track down previous issues with a server to establish patterns of problematic hardware, software or networking.

We understand that it’s an emergency, but please don’t let your panic prevent us from being able to resolve the problem quickly or learn from that incident in to assist you in the future.

13. Include as Much Information as Possible

Always include error messages, exactly what you did before getting those errors and any relevant sections of log files to demonstrate what problems you are running into. If it’s with a specific domain or account, provide those, too. A ticket with “This doesn’t work!” doesn’t tell us much, since we need to know more about “this” and how it’s not working.

The more information we have about the problem, the better. Otherwise, there may be some back-and-forth on the ticket that ends up taking hours instead of minutes.

Here’s the biggest one that folks have told me about:

14. Trust Us, We’re Here for You

After a ticket is submitted, a lot of customers will speed-dial Technical Support, asking them to read the ticket and address it immediately.

We’re here to assist, but jumping the queue by calling in isn’t necessarily effective in escalating your ticket. We triage issues based on the severity of the incident, which technicians are best equipped to handle a given problem, and if the ticket needs to be handled by any of our other teams (Networking, Data Centers, Professional Services, Advanced Services, Abuse, etc.).

And, unlike those pesky elevators which actually do show up quicker when you press the button multiple times, calling in to check if a reboot has been completed will not get a server rebooted faster. Our call center is downtown while the Houston data centers are at least 30 miles away. (Dallas is even farther than that!) Data center technicians work through the queues as quickly as possible, and they are generally able to respond to tickets within minutes of submission.

We understand that you’re frustrated when your business depends on your server, and sometimes that materializes in blowing off some steam and passing along some of the heat that your own clients are dumping on you.

One odd thing I’ve noticed in my time here is that I’ve actually become a lot nicer and more patient with service representatives on the telephone. I’ve been reading the FAQs and submitting trouble tickets when possible. I know what it’s like on the other end of the line. I know what it’s like to be them.

OK, so that’s all I’ve got for this time around. I’ll have more next time.

Until then, save me the last flagon of iced tea in the break room, and thank you for choosing The Planet!

-Laurence

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