The Planet Blog

Hi everyone! I started working at The Planet a few months ago in the technical support department, and I’ve really enjoyed my experience here. I’ve been on the customer side of technical support calls for most of my life, so I’ve never understood what it was like to be on the supporting side of the call. Now that my perspective has changed a little, I’ve noticed that the best customer support occurs when the support provider and the support requester work together to create the best experience possible.

Shelves of books have been written about providing great customer support, but I haven’t seen many written about how to get great customer support. When you work with a service-based company, you’re likely going to interact with customer support representatives regularly. During these interactions, your experience will not be defined by your question or the issue you have. Instead, it will be defined by how you present your issue to technical support.

It can be extremely frustrating when a server goes down or a script isn’t working the way it should. When this happens, my gut reaction is to get upset and throw my keyboard. I’ve also noticed that when I am angry, I have a difficult time trying to explain my problem to technical support. I’ve come to realize that I’m not alone in that regard, and with my newfound perspective, I came up with a few tips that might help you get the most bang for your buck when you work with customer support:

1. Remember there’s a human on the other end. It doesn’t matter where the customer support representative is; they’re human, and their responsibility is to help you. I don’t have any empirical data, but human nature tells me it’s easier to be nice to someone who is nice to you. Once you realize there’s a person on the other end of the phone trying to do his/her job, it’s a little easier to thank them in advance for their help. It may seem insignificant, but if you thank me in advance for my help, I’ll subconsciously work harder in an effort to deserve that gratitude.
2. Don’t assume your request will be ignored. I’m surprised by the number of people who start or end their e-mail with, “No one will probably see this, but …” or “Not that anyone cares, but …” Don’t assume that you’ll be ignored. That assumption is more of an overarching negative sentiment than it is a “reverse psychology” play. The support process can be defined by the expectations you set for it, so get started on the right foot and expect that your questions will be answered and issues will be resolved.
3. Don’t start with a threat. “If you don’t do this, I’m going to report this to my bank and other authorities,” or “If you don’t respond within 25 seconds, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer” … It’s not uncommon to hear things like this in the first message in a ticket. Starting with a threat never helps your cause. It’s much easier to help someone who seems easy to help. Invoking lawyers does not make your ticket seem easy to address.
4. Provide useful, descriptive and relevant information. This tip can be tough since it’s hard to understand what information is relevant, but think about it before you send a support request. If you are having trouble logging in, then “I can’t log in. Any ideas?” is not quite as clear as “Whenever I try to log in, the login screen just reloads without an error message. I know my username and password is correct. Any ideas? Thanks.” That extra information will help considerably and will reduce the number of back-and-forth e-mails between you and the support representative.
5. Don’t write overly detailed, wordy support requests. The longer your e-mail, the more difficult it is to read, diagnose and to respond. A representative has to read the entire ticket to find what’s meaningful and figure out exactly what’s wrong. Since they’re trying to help you, you want to reduce their burden. You want to make it as easy as possible for them to help you. So, be clear, concise and brief. If you’ve got a couple different issues for support to look at, break them out into individual tickets … different issues may need to be addressed by different departments, so multiple issues in a single ticket can lead to delays in responding to specific issues in the ticket.
6. More Tickets ≠ More Support. Don’t create multiple support tickets for a single issue … While it seems like you are drawing more attention to the issue and creating a sense of urgency, you’re really slowing down the support process. Support representatives might be addressing the same issue in parallel or information might be lost between tickets, elongating the time to resolution.
7. Escalate your tickets smartly. If you think a ticket should be handled differently or if you would like a supervisor to look into a specific issue, you should always feel free to request escalation to a manager or a supervisor. The best way to make that request is to update your open ticket, initiate a live chat or place a call into the technical support phone line. If you aren’t satisfied with your support experience, then we aren’t either, so we want to hear from you.

As you can see, the prescription is not too complicated: Prepare yourself to receive the best support, and you’re much more likely to receive it.

- Sean

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

I’ve spent many years in various tech support roles throughout my career, regularly reviewing issues customers face. At The Planet, our goal is to provide excellent service for our customers, which usually comes through our support tickets. Most of our customers use the ticket system, so I thought I’d offer some thoughts on how to ensure we help you resolve outstanding issues quickly and thoroughly.

Here is an example of a support ticket that provides just about every detail that’s necessary to remediate the issue:

—–SNIP—–

Department: Support

Subject: New York City AT&T DSL unable to connect to my server in DLLSTX6

Server: servername-1.2.3.4

Body: My customer, Jon Smith, is unable to ssh into 1.2.3.4 on tcp/22 from 255.255.255.255. We have insured that Jon is not being blocked via iptables and he can connect to Apache on tcp/80.

[root@server ~]# iptables –nLChain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)target prot opt source

destination Chain FORWARD (policy ACCEPT)target prot opt source

destination Chain OUTPUT (policy ACCEPT)target prot opt source destination[root@server ~]#

[root@server ~]# traceroute 255.255.255.255

myserversgateway (1.2.3.1) 0.004 ms 0.020 ms 0.011 ms

1 dsr01.dllstx2.theplanet.com (12.96.160.9) 0.901 ms 0.944 ms 1.174 ms

2 …3 ……10 …11 255.255.255.255 (255.255.255.255) 42.211 ms 50.421 ms 45.114 ms[root@server ~]# ping 255.255.255.255PING 255.255.255.255 (255.255.255.255) 56(84) bytes of data.

64 bytes from 255.255.255.255 (255.255.255.255): icmp_seq=0 ttl=43 time=49.0 ms

64 bytes from 255.255.255.255 (255.255.255.255): icmp_seq=1 ttl=43 time=45.4 ms

64 bytes from 255.255.255.255 (255.255.255.255): icmp_seq=2 ttl=43 time=45.5 ms

64 bytes from 255.255.255.255 (255.255.255.255): icmp_seq=3 ttl=43 time=54.0 ms

64 bytes from 255.255.255.255 (255.255.255.255): icmp_seq=4 ttl=43 time=46.1 ms

— 255.255.255.255 ping statistics —

5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4003ms

rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 45.453/48.060/54.077/3.277 ms, pipe 2

[root@server ~]#

[customer@remoteserver ~]$ telnet 1.2.3.4 80

Trying 1.2.3.4…

Connected to myserver.tld (1.2.3.4).

Escape character is ‘^]’.

HEAD / HTTP/1.0

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found

Date: Fri, 06 Jul 2007 17:34:37 GMT

Server: Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat)

Connection: closeContent-

Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Connection closed by foreign host.[customer@remoteserver ~]$

ssh 1.2.3.4ssh_exchange_identification:

Connection closed by remote host[customer@remoteserver ~]$ telnet 1.2.3.4 22

Trying 1.2.3.4…

Connected to myserver.tld (1.2.3.4).Escape character is ‘^]’.

Connection closed by foreign host.[customer@remoteserver ~]$

You can login to my server with the credentials listed in Orbit. You can reach me any time at (555) 555-5555.

Thank you,Bob

Customerbob@remote.tld

—END SNIP—

Without ever logging into the server, our trained technicians are able to immediately identify the problem. The issue in this case is that either through a script(bfd) or other means, the remote user is being denied by TCP WRAPPERS (man 5 hosts_access). We are able to see that iptables are not blocking any connections, and we are able to reach the server without issue on another TCP port that’s not typically controlled by the wrapper. The customer ensures that the ticket subject was descriptive so that our technicians are able to evaluate the ticket in the support system queue. Each technician typically has a different area of expertise, so we work to steer the ticket to the right person for the job. Here is a list of subjects that provide helpful information for the support techs responding to the ticket:

1. cPanel: WHM is not responding. Server is accessible via SSH
2. Apache: My .cgi is giving a 501 error
3. cPanel: Apache is segfaulting after I upgraded PHP
4. Exim: User so-and-so cannot send outgoing form mail after tweaking security in cPanel
5. Server kernel panics daily. Need to have the RAM tested/replaced
6. MySQL: forums refusing more than 100 concurrent users
7. Reboot Request**
8. Network: San Jose, CA – 350ms RTT via Sprintlink

** #7 should not be a Support Ticket but a Reboot Ticket.

At The Planet, tech support is always eager to help resolve issues quickly and efficiently, so when customers add a bit of detail in the subject line, we’re able to ensure the ticket is routed to the most appropriate individual.

Just a few tips to help bring a quick resolution to a number of support issues. Thanks for stopping by.

- Anthony