The Planet Blog

Hi there. It’s me again. I’m still in the trenches, trying to find a decent Reuben sandwich in the tunnels.

Daylight saving time ended last month in Texas, and as I changed my clocks, I dutifully replaced the battery in my smoke alarm, just like the public service announcements advised. As I balanced on a chair on top of my coffee table, I pondered: Why is the smoke alarm running on a battery and not, say, plugged into the wall?

Well, in a fire, power can get interrupted, so it’s best to have the smoke alarm running on an independent source of power that you can test and replace when necessary. In a way, this applies to your server, too.

Since my previous post, I’ve counted up a total of 18 incidents where a customer did not get notification of an update to a ticket or a critical message regarding a change to our services. Every one of those missed communications could be traced to an e-mail address residing on the affected server. Each one of those customers suffered downtime because they either didn’t receive an alert in a reasonable amount of time or they didn’t respond to a technician who was ready and waiting to assist them.

And those incidents were just the ones that I fielded … there’s no telling how many folks out there have their “server smoke detectors” hard-wired into the wall.

It’s critical that you keep your contact information up-to-date in Orbit and that you provide us with an external e-mail address. Same thing goes with the monitoring system: Use a contact address that will work if the server goes down.

The best solution I’ve found is to use a third-party provider like Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, and forward those contacts/alerts to your primary mailbox (which can be on your server). By setting your contact address to a third-party provider first, you can ensure that you will always be able to access any important notifications. If you use a mail program like Outlook or Thunderbird, you can have the program check your third-party mailbox in parallel with your primary mailbox, eliminating the need to set up an auto-forward rule.

My advice: Do both.

Yes, I know that means you’ll get two messages for every one delivered to that emergency line, but in the end, isn’t it better to be over-notified of a potential emergency than to not hear about it at all?

-Laurence

I’ve got a serious case of ad blindness. I generally ignore banner advertisements online, tune out when a TV show goes to commercial (except when ShamWow! is being advertised), and I rifle through newspaper pages to read only the most important content — the comics.

“Use as directed.” “Prices and participation may vary.” “Your call may be monitored or recorded to ensure quality customer care.” “Wow, Kevin. You are incredible.” I hear those phrases all the time, so I’m almost desensitized to their meanings: Of course you should use a product like you’re supposed to … If a McDonald’s branch doesn’t give me a Big Mac at the $2 promotional price, that branch loses my business … The call “may” be monitored or recorded (so it’s probably not … right?) … And yes, I know I’m incredible.

In last week’s edition of “This Week* in Vending,” you met The Planet’s Manager of Technical Support Christian Plunkett. Four minutes and 25 seconds into the video, Christian sent my world into a spiral of uncertainty as he explained the weekly call calibration session used to monitor and score The Planet’s phone support quality. What? Calls are monitored and recorded for quality purposes? What does that mean for my other assumptions? Maybe Mitch Hedberg was right when he talked about the existence of a McDonald’s that didn’t participate in anything: “Cheeseburgers? Nope. We got spaghetti … And blankets.”

Once I was coaxed, shivering and confused, from the corner of the darkest room I could find, I pulled myself together enough to join in on last week’s call calibration meeting to get a sense of what all that monitoring and quality assurance looks like behind the scenes. The managers, supervisors and call center reps from our billing care, technical support and quality assurance groups meet in “The Attic” (an aptly named conference room on the lofty mezzanine level of our Houston headquarters) to hear and evaluate randomly-chosen calls from various reps. Our phone system automatically records, stores and indexes each phone call, which can be easily accessed and searched via Web browser. So, in a matter of a few clicks, we hear the “Thank you for calling The Planet” greeting from the first call.

Each person in the meeting has a quality control call monitoring form to grade the customer experience based on each conversation. Points are assigned in various categories to ensure thorough, friendly and consistent calls, with a maximum score of 100 per call. This monitoring process is constantly updated and improved as we meet and exceed the expectations we set for ourselves, with the overarching goal being able to resolve every problem quickly and easily on the customer’s first call.

Because you are probably interested in what one of these calibration sessions looks like, I’ll sneak you in behind the lines. This clip features a discussion about using of the caller’s name conversationally during the call to cultivate a more comfortable, friendly experience.

In addition to these call calibration meetings, individual monitoring sessions are held weekly between every rep and his/her supervisor. These meetings give each agent an opportunity to self-analyze and improve their own service based on what they hear as a third party. Beside providing direct and immediate feedback for each rep, we’ve used these monitoring sessions to evaluate our own support processes. As a result, we’ve changed serveral confusing or unclear policies in order to better streamline the path to a resolution for every customer.

The customer experience at The Planet has gotten even better, so we’re very happy to be constructively dissatisfied with our progress.

-Kevin

Given the phenomenal success of Todd’s “This Month in Vending” interview last week, along with his survival, we decided to post a new episode for your viewing pleasure. With this quick turnaround, we changed the name of the segment to “This Week* in Vending” with the asterisk doubling as an attention grabber for the word change … and as an excuse in case we aren’t able to keep up the pace.

In this interview, I enjoy a vending machine chili-cheese hot dog with Christian Plunkett, The Planet’s Manager of Technical Support. A new addition to the episode is the welcome music track pulled from a song performed by our very own Brandon Holbrook … Hopefully he accepts this shout-out as a substitute for the royalties an artist would typically receive.

If you’ve worked with anyone here at The Planet and you’re interested in hearing from them in a segment of “This Week* in Vending,” please let us know. If you work at The Planet and you want to embarrass one of your co-workers, feel free to nominate them as well.

-Kevin

The YouTube link: This Week in Vending: Christian Plunkett

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

If you follow the link, you’ll see that this number is unique in so many ways.

I won’t go into the specifics of the number, but will provide a general overview along with why I’d be proud to have anybody associate this number with The Planet and myself.

Continue multiplying with further integers and you can add the first number to the remaining 6 numbers to continue this cyclic permutation, or end up with the same nice high repeating number. What is a cyclic permutation? And why would one be proud to be associated with such a sequence? I’ll let you dive further into the details. What we have here is a number that repeats itself in cycles (cyclic permutation) when multiplied by integers.

1 × 142,857 = 142,857

2 × 142,857 = 285,714

3 × 142,857 = 428,571

4 × 142,857 = 571,428

5 × 142,857 = 714,285

6 × 142,857 = 857,142

7 × 142,857 = 999,999

What I see here is repetition at its finest. Repetition in a company is essential whether it be in support, accounting, information technology, networking, marketing or any other department. Repetition ensures that you end up with the same, or at least similar, results. The results should either be those that are expected or close to, with the ability to correct them. We can now associate the expected results to 142857 and the unexpected results to 1142856. When we end up with the figure 1142856, we know what needs to be done in order to correct it: 1 + 142856 = 142857.

In IT departments we should always follow this rule. While every project may be different, and require some fine tuning, we should get used to doing our job the same way every time. This ensures that if someone is sick or on vacation, any other team member can simply jump in and continue the work without breaking stride. Whether someone is evaluating new network equipment or a new control panel everything must be documented from start-to-end.

In our tech support, it’s a rule we work to follow so that we provide consistent service to our customers.

Let us know what you expect and what you were provided with support. This will help us to keep up with your ever-changing world, while we provide the infrastructure and support to ensure your business growth.

- Anthony

Hello, world! I’m Jason Mathews, the dayshift supervisor for technical support. I’ve been playing with computers since 300 baud and in the industry since 1992. I’ve been a network engineer, systems administrator and all around go-to guy for anything powered by electrons. So I have a lot of personal experience helping customers deal with issues when they arise.

Managing dedicated servers and the associated infrastructure can be pretty complex, and we’re here to help with that.

As an example, cPanel has gone to version 11, and there have been some support requests since the upgrade. This is no slight on cPanel — I’m not picking on them. It’s typical to see some initial discomfort when new versions come out, and usually there are some easy fixes. Since we’ve heard from some customers about this recent version, I thought it might be helpful to provide some tips in our blog to help:

1) Find your current version of Perl. You can do that by typing in:

perl –v

at the command line. Make sure that your servers have Perl 5.8.7 at a minimum. 5.8.8 would be better, and to get the installer package for that, run this in SSH asroot:

wget http://layer2.cpanel.net/perl588installer.tar.gz

tar zxvf perl588installer.tar.gz

cd perl588installer

perl install

This will get perl up-to-date and recompile a whole lot of perl modules that cPanel depends on. cPanel isn’t updating perl directly, and if it’s anything below 5.8.7, many modules won’t work, recompile at all or will provide strange output.

2) Run this script and check the output: /scripts/updateuserdomains

This will read the user files in /var/cpanel/users and make any needed synchronization with other system files, such as Apache and ftp.

Sometimes, however, the user configuration will have conflicts you may not have noticed, mostly by one account having control of a domain while that domain is still active on another account. This inconsistency can cause a lot of trouble later on, so you’ll want to edit the user files directly, remove the offending domain, then run the script again.

3) Verify all of cPanel is updated to version 11.

perl -c /scripts/wwwacct

If this command doesn’t have any errors, then everything should be at the proper version. If you get errors, something might be missing, so run this:

/usr/local/cpanel/bin/checkperlmodules

/scripts/upcp -force

This will double check all perl modules and run the update in force mode, overwriting existing cPanel functions with the latest ones. If this still doesn’t work, let us know, and we can try more detailed fixes, or we can escalate the issue to cPanel directly and they can provide a proper fix.

4) Ensure that you are using the maildir format in email. The previous versions of cPanel used both mbox and maildir formats, but mbox is being phased out, and maildir is much more efficient anyway. To check this,run:

/scripts/convert2maildir

This will tell you what your current mail format is, and offer you the chance to convert to maildir and backup current mailboxes before the change. This script is pretty reliable, I haven’t run across any problems with it. It will install the latest courier-imap to handle the new format. This will also mean that Horde and Squirrelmail will then work with the new format, and Neomail will go away, since that has long since been deprecated.

That’s pretty much it. These are the steps we would follow in looking at any recent issue with cPanel. I would welcome any comments or suggestions for the next posting. If there’s something you want to know about technical support and what it is we do, I’ll write about it.

- Jason