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.

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

The general consensus from our clients seemed to be that phone support should be partially replaced by the live chat option. While we didn’t necessarily disagree, we needed to have hard stats on the implications of such. The comparison we ran in the last week was “Live chat VS phone” for usage:

Number of chats: 412
Number of phone calls: 96

Number of missed chats: 1
Number of missed phone calls: 11

Average live chat length for a resolution: 4 minutes
Average phone call length for a resolution: 29 minutes

With phone support, a missed call can be sickening for a client, but it’s also much easier for a call to be missed if the queue is full of people waiting. It is something of a guarantee that if we miss a call, a client is going to be mad at us when, frankly, it was probably just circumstances that prevented an agent from taking the call. Live chat takes this difficulty away because it is highly automated on the request side. If the queue is full, it allows for instant ticket submission. It is also much more efficient, as you can see from the ‘average length…’ item above.

We have come to the conclusion that we agree with our clients on this matter. Live chat should most definitely be 24/7, with phone support as an option through regular business hours (9-5).

We’ll be updating all clients within 24 hours regarding what method of phone support will be available. We are highly dissatisfied with our new PBX system and will look to change it where possible.

Keep an eye on this space..

We are looking for feedback from clients regarding the portal. Please note that you can reply directly to the announcement previously sent out. The team, in my opinion, did a Grade A job and we’d love to hear from more clients regarding their opinions.

Further to this very short posts, I’d like to make it official that The Genius Network as a whole will go live on June 1st. It is and will be the only network of it’s kind, encompassing multi-layer redundancy at hardware, software and network level. For resellers and dedicated clients especially, this is a massive, massive introduction.

-Simon

My name is Jeremy and I am a geek.

As a self confessed geek, I would like first to define the difference between geeks and nerds: Geeks get things done.

Aside from the obvious, my itinerary for the next number of weeks is to introduce and champion several changes in the support protocols at EIRCA Ltd. The first item on the agenda is the introduction of a support SLA, and a new level of support on all fronts.

General support is the forefront of my agenda, and we will be offering a 4 hour guarantee for responses unless very specifically defined by a technical support agent in the ticket. Credits will be issued to a clients account if we do not hold up our end of the bargain. My original plan was to have this come in to effect on Wednesday February 18th but I was a little over zealous on my estimation as it was pointed out to me, as it should be, that we can not have an SLA without paperwork. That paperwork is protect both our clientbase and ourselves. The last thing we need as we are venturing forward with this revamp is to be caught on a technicalities such as “but you didn’t say coding questions weren’t covered!”.

I have requested to our management team that they have that paperwork ready for me on Monday. They’ll do that for us.

The new additions to the support options are two fold:

1) ‘Higher level’ support. The name is terrible, but I am sure Simon or Callum will correct it later. What this means is: If you are a reseller or shared hosting client that needs constant “priority support” such as responses in less than 2 hours, or general coding assistance, you can now get this type of support. Don’t confuse this with Emergency Support. Emergency support will remain free and mindblowingly (spell check police: I apologise) fast.

2) Pay per play (my term, temporary): Think of this in the same way as one of those pay-as-you-go phones. It’s exactly as it sounds: If you require a support issue to get priority support, you can now pay a nominal fee to get it escalatedagain this does not include emergencies. Emergency issues such as server outages will always get you a lightning fast response. This option is for those of you that, for example, have a general question that simply needs answering as if it was an emergency. The management team will give you the correct verbeage but I think you’ll grasp the concept from this blog entry with regards to what I am trying to introduce. My personal recommendation is that the Pay Per Play option is charged at $3.

For those that recoil at the very notion of paying for technical support, please remember that this option is completely separate from the points addressed above. You’ll still have your SLA, plus the ‘higher level’ option.

The team assigned to higher level and per per play support instances will be completely separate from the on staff general support guys. There will be no cross over at any time of the day. If you submit a pay per play orhigher level ticket, you are submitting a request to different staff members than you would get by submitting a general support request.

The introduction of these support options is one of the primary reasons the management team hired 11 new personnel. to offer separate levels of support, we must have multiple teams. We now have multiple teams.

If anyone has any suggestions or comments, please email me at the address that was sent to you all Yesterday.

I will post more on the changes during my shift tomorrow.

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.

IMPORTANT: These investments do not allow any investors a voting right on company policies, nor does it give any amount of ownership to said investors. This is term-defined (15 year structure) investment only. I can not be any clearer on this subject; the company is still wholly owned by me, and will continue to be as such

What does this mean? It means we can now go ahead with the items outlined here, in addition to several overhauls such as the support center, 11 new employees to start in the second week of February, a new office in Shelburne, Nova Scotia (for me) and many more items.

As a result of this investment, two staff changes (in addition to those listed above) have occurred: Darren and Jason are no longer with the company and we wish them the best of luck in the future.

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

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.

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.