Why Customer-Focused Process Improvement?

We had storms move through our little piece of paradise yesterday. About the time the storms started doing their damage, my outgoing email service failed…and hasn’t worked well since. As a good customer of technology who understands the importance of recording each and every “incident”, I submitted a repair ticket. The first response from the service desk agent said there was no indication that there was a problem with my service. OK…that in itself is a problem. First of all, the Level One support desk doesn’t know what’s going on. Secondly, their first reaction was to blame the user - ME! OK, they didn’t come out and say I was committing an I-D 10-T error, but the implication was there.

My second email from the ISP said that their servers were undergoing what they called “maintenance.” OK, so this person knows there is “something” going on and it’s on their end and it may just have impacted my service. Perhaps it’s not the user after all. But maintenance is no excuse for my service being out. Email is so ingrained in our communications now that we quite justifiably expect it to be as “available” as our telephones. Any maintenance that interrupts service for more than one hour should be preceded by notice to the customers of the interruption. Even my blog host tells me when their servers are undergoing maintenance. Hey, come to think of it, why exactly is this “maintenance” being done during prime business hours? If the ISP doesn’t have the required redundancy capacity or fail-over technology, they should get out of the Email business. Because, last I checked, this IS a business. Customer expectations obviously exceed the ISP’s ability to provide the service.

If this outage was caused by a power interruption due to the weather, I can understand, to some degree, the unannounced outage. But we do have solutions for that too. If a server failed due to overheating because of hardware proliferation in the data center, then the ISP needs to invest in consolidation and some clustering, virtual or other management architecture to balance the load. If there has been an upgrade that caused the outgoing mail server outage and the intermittent services of Web Mail, then I suspect Release Management has not yet figured out how to do sufficient and effective testing. The ISP apparently doesn’t have an effective roll-back plan as it is apparent, if this “maintenance” was indeed an upgrade, the release did not work. I’m still not able to send mail so my service is down while they’re figuring this thing out. Perhaps we need Configuration Management. If we do need to roll back to a previous state, we would know exactly what that “previous state” is. What a novel thought!

At any rate, the ISP is in business to provide a service. They need to start thinking about their customers. This isn’t about information technology. It IS about business and service however. This is the ISP’s business and service for their customers - ME. That affects MY business and MY service to MY clients. Information technology is there to help the ISP realize its business obligations. And, by sending me a bill every month, they have an obligation to ME. Speaking of that obligation, since they did not specify a service level or publish a maintenance schedule, I’m assuming my service will be available ALL the time. Unless you state otherwise, that’s my expectation.

If the ISP intends to continue competing in this space, they’ve got to get the basics right. What is more basic than Email? OK, I’m not saying managing Email is easy. But I am saying that from the customer’s point-of-view, the perception of Email is that it is a basic service.

I can assure you, that with the competition among ISPs, when options become available this ISP’s market share will be at risk if they can’t get the basics figured out. No one has time to deal with mediocrity especially for something as straightforward as Email. Keep in mind, too, that customer perception is all-important. If the customer doesn’t have confidence in the ISP’s ability to provide basic services, how can they possibly expect to sell that same customer “more bandwidth”, premium cable services or VOIP? There’s a domino effect here that can either make or break the ISP’s market. Geeze, am I saying that best practices in management and customer service can offer a competitive advantage?

In retrospect, this is the only significant outage of this duration that I recall in the past 18 months. But it really doesn’t matter. If I had known ahead of time, if the ISP had communicated the potential outage, I may not have been so upset. But the fact that they did not communicate, or felt the interruption would not be significant - that I wouldn’t notice(?) - suggests an unacceptable attitude, a disregard for my needs as a customers and blatant disrespect for me as an individual.

So is there a lesson in this for the rest of us? Let’s see:
• Empower your service desk with the tools they need to effectively manage triage.
• Train your service desk agents to be sensitive to their customers. The only personal encounter any customer may ever have with your company just may be the first service desk agent to answer the phone or respond to email when there’s a problem.
• Communicate maintenance windows and potential service disruptions.
• Invest in proper testing processes and technology.
• Invest in controlling the proliferation of hardware. A configuration management process is a good place to start.
• Invest in redundancy if the expected service is 7X24X365
• Invest in resilient architecture with the appropriate management overhead to manage the anticipated work load.
• Think “Service Level Management” to first understand what your customer expects and then to set their expectations for the service you are providing.
• Essentially, get control over the variables that comprise your service offering.

Are all these investments worth it? Well, do you want to stay in business? Hey guys, if you don’t want to INVEST in a process and systems architecture that will meet your customers needs, that’s fine with me. Someone else will start serving my communication needs in my neighborhood very soon anyway. Maybe that someone is one of my clients. But just try to keep the rubber bands, duct tape and string together a bit longer so I can stay in touch with my clients. I’m not sure about you but I do have a business to run.