Monday morning customer service

To this day Office Space is probably the best depiction of what life is like in corporate America. You show up after a great weekend just to face the crap from everyone you interact with – then you pass the buck on to someone else and hope that the person downstream from you doesn’t have suicidal tendencies that would loop the problem right back to your desk.

By now you’re pretty familiar with my business model – we are the big data center provider for apps and services to resellers, large corporate IT departments, etc. This means that Monday morning is when we get every complaint about everything that has popped up on other peoples networks. I know exactly how this process works:

“Ok, I could fix this in 45 minutes… or I could watch youtube and say that I’ve alerted the vendor who is working on it. Ah well, it’s Vlad’s problem now.”

So what we’ve instituted to keep entrepreneurial laziness from affecting our support flow is “Case of Mondays” blog post. Every Monday by 9 AM folks are to report the issue they are working on across product groups. Consolidate down to a single paragraph or hopefully a short bullet point list.

This way we can preempt questions and close them out on the spot as problems that are being worked on. This will hopefully optimize support time because requests will no longer be investigated individually but will be tracked by a team and notified through the blog. This also eliminates the followup questions from people that obviously didn’t read the manual. “It’s an issue, being worked on, we’ll fix it and update the NOC site.”

Then when the resolution is here we can neatly document it under our KB and NOC as well as Shockey Monkey announcements so that everyone gets to stay in the loop with us. This is just a first step of the goal to integrate our process and support flow into ConnectWise and Autotask and eliminate a lot of waste from support cycle.

I know many of you are MSPs and are accountable to your customers for the state of the network. Take a look at what we are doing, what do you do beyond that to keep the clients who want to know in the know about your activities?