With the company going through it’s most fruitful patch ever, new client wise, I see some predictable issues occurring, especially with support.
Since the turn of the year, we have experienced record growth, almost doubling our client base in the process. One thing that this inevitably leads to is congestion in the support system, something that I myself hate to see because the company was founded on our support operations.
The first “pod” in The Genius Network is about to be put online. This will act as an immediate replacement to win02 and all accounts on win02 will be migrated to the new pod.
It is with great sadness that I have to announce that Stiofan O’Riordan, a lifelong friend and 8 year colleague passed away on May 6th, 2009.
Stiofan was involved in a vehicle accident late Wednesday night and lost his life immediately, according to the authorities.
Stiofan and myself grew up together, attended the Leeds United Football Club Youth Academy together for over two years, then worked together at EIRCA for the next eight years. EIRCA as a company, and My heartfelt condolences go out to his wife, Chantelle, and their two children.
Stiofan was 27.
I know that Stiofan worked side by side with many of you over the past number of years and I know for sure that his presence at this company will be severely missed by many on both a professional and personal level.
Messages may be conveyed to the O’Riordan family via email to: oriordan.family@eirca.net
Since the heavy changes have started being rung in since January 26th, we have been discussing with clients the best way we can issue support in the future. Many great idea’s were discussed, with a recurring theme: Bring back live chat! (more…)
As most clients already know, The Genius Network is progressing at a fair rate of knots, the first major part of the introduction being the new client support portal, The Genius Portal (https://genius.eirca.net) (more…)
As many of our valued clients will know, we at EIRCA are going through some very big changes at the moment with many parts of our organisation coming under scrutiny from yours truly as the new manager for the Technical Support (”Signature Support”?) team.
In the past several weeks I have been working with an investment firm in order to secure investment for some dramatic changes we want to make. Well, the time has come to confirm that investment and, as of today, we can confirm that the investments are now in effect.
This post is something of a placeholder for further information, but here’s a run-down of what is coming up in the first two weeks of 2009:
1) Official introduction of The Genius Network™ 2) Three additional tech support staff starting, based in Australia 3) New (type to be determined) servers to be added in Seattle 4) New support SLA for specific levels of reseller accounts (Previously posted averages/expectations to be unchanged for unaffected levels of reseller hosting accounts) 5) Information on the next datacenter
We hope everyone had a great 2008 and, from all the staff at EIRCA, here’s to an even better 2009
Greetings folks:It has come to our attention over the last few weeks that ticket response times, on average, were significantly higher than usual. We believe that the main reason for this was the toll free phone system being out of sorts, which forced the ticket queues to be larger than normal.
Also of interest, the live chat system conked out on us, with no help available from the application developers (php live) so will be replaced in the next few weeks.
We expect that with the phone system now fixed, average response times will settle back to around the 40 minute mark, though the target, which is used on the site, will still be four hours.
Immediate support can be gained via the toll free system, of course, and should help bring the averages down. We’ll be looking at this again in a months time to make sure that responses are kept within the target range.
As part of our huge overhaul of EIRCA Live! we will be replacing the current ticket system, Ubersmith, and are almost ready to go with the new solution.
The question will no doubt arise, so I’ll tackle it here. Why leave Ubersmith?
There’s no short answer, it’s due to a number of problems that have raised their head over the last year. No client-side issues were apparent but the backend was littered with them. From an antiquated staff interface that was meant to be updated/replaced over a year ago, to the severe lack of customization, Ubersmith as a product looks to be on its last legs.
Ubersmith, as a company, have a new product: “Ubersmith DE”. Unfortunately, this product has now apparently taken over all development work done by the company and the “pro” version, despite its hefty price tag, has been allowed to go with one minor update in 18 months. That’s just not acceptable.
With our growth over the last 4-6 month breaking every record set internally over the past seven years, we feel that staying with Ubersmith would be naive and, dare I say it, foolish.
The new support center is 98% ready. The last task is the importing of clients and services.
Stiofan posted in our forum discussion topic with a screenshot (you must login to view it) and, as you can see, the integration is with the EIRCA Live! portal as a whole.
An announcement will be made very soon regarding the switch over to the new system. It is important to note that we will be keeping the ‘old’ support center active for a number of months in order for people to have a historical view of their tickets.
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