steveorg

I had a traumatic issue this morning, made much worse by ill conceived Surpass support policies that are inherently anxiety producing and counter-productive. I want to make it clear that this is not a hit on the support department. They are generally responsive and effective.

The issue was that an important MySQL database disappeared. I reported it at 6:51 AM and received a reply at 7:06 AM that a 5 hour old backup was located. That was excellent, but that's when the problems started. I was also told that the ticket was moved to sales for approval of the restore! The restore was accomplished at 9:20 AM. That’s two hours and fifteen minutes of unnecessary down time and several more grey hairs.

The ticket subject was marked as Extremely Urgent and I mentioned that the down time is devastating. That was not an exaggeration. I was left with a conundrum. Do I reply to the ticket saying that the delay was unacceptable and have the ticket moved to the bottom of the queue, do I do nothing or do I open a new ticket with tech support so I don't have to wait for sales to respond? The new ticket was the only acceptable choice even though that was outside of policy and probably annoying to the support desk.

This incident underscores three shortcomings in the support structure and policies.

1. Penalizing new postings to existing tickets by pushing them to the bottom of the queue makes no sense. At a minimum, the oldest non-responded post should determine priority. Sometimes new posts provide useful info that could make the support desk’s job faster. I’m sure that many Surpass users uncover additional useful information by continuing to debug issues after reporting them. Being able to pass on the info without penalty could speed up the closing of a ticket, which helps everyone. Unless you’ve been through the drill or have read any of the distressed threads from unaware users on this forum about unresponsiveness despite all of their repeated support posts, you don’t know about this policy and can unknowingly delay your ticket. Surpass should at least warn these poor soles before letting them post to a ticket twice in a row.

This prioritization also does not account for the age of the incident. I’ve had tickets that required many postings back and forth before final resolution. Even if a problem is 24 hours old, a 10 minute old ticket gets priority because it was started 1 second before the last posting on the older ticket. The times between responses were not individually slow, but if they could have been prioritized by age of incident the issue could have been resolved within an hour or two. Change of shifts sometimes caused additional delays because the new support person took extra posts to get up to speed. That delays everybody.

2. The support system doesn’t prioritize by urgency. All priorities are “default”. Surpass probably has a legitimate concern that since most people consider their issue important, given a choice they would mark it urgent. That doesn’t mean that Surpass can’t have some internal system where the support personnel make a determination about urgency. I can’t be sure that they don’t already do that, but given my experience, I’d be surprised if they do.

3. My ticket was moved to sales so that they could decide if I should be charged for the restore. That’s a fair question and I’ve never been unfairly charged by Surpass for extra services. The problem is that the sales department isn’t 24/7 like the support department and moving a ticket to sales pushes it down the queue. Tech support should be empowered to make this decision, especially since they probably provide sales with guidance anyway. If nothing else, users should be given the choice to pay for the charge with a chance to appeal for a refund to the sales department later.

I’d be interested in hearing other thoughts on these issues and certainly appreciate some insight from someone at Surpass.

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Steve

Twist3d

Is this a cry for help or just general questions?

If you need help a faster response would take place at http://desk.surpasshosting.com

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steveorg

This is an attempt to start a discussion to encourage Surpass to reassess some of their support strategies. Twist3d - What do you think about the three shortcomings that I wrote about?

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Steve

H

1. I agree... It seems silly, but I think that's more a general way support ticketing system work. If there's an option for them, I definitely think they should explore it.

2. Priority would be useful -- but only in the case of people actually use it properly. Think of how many people will put minor things as "super high priority"? I think if they take this approach, there should be a list of possible issues (eg: my server is down!) that mask values.

3. I think this will be problematic. It's not a good idea to start throwing responsibility of one department at another one. And I think a lot of people might think differently about restoring based on whether they have to pay that $20 fee or not, so just doing it and saying "we'll evaluate whether you need to pay for the back-up and tell you later" isn't going to be liked by a lot of people.

panache

well impo if you did not cause data to be lost... then thats surpasses responsibility.. would it not... but does it not say somewhere you are responsible to make your own backups??

also there are the daily and weekly backups that do have the database info in them as well.. so it comes to a catch 22 as the saying goes.

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removed

About Surpass Hosting -> Backup Policy.

Our backup systems are maintained on a best effort basis. We will do our best to keep backups active for all accounts, but this is done as a courtesy to our customers, and no guarantees are included with said backups.

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itsmethee

1. I think this hits on a very important point and Surpass needs to find a way to address this. People should not be penalized foe updating tickets with more information.

2. As you stated, a user driven system would not work. I think it is also hard for support to do because who are they to judge if your database being down is more or less important than someone else's issue.

3. Support should give you the option to risk paying if you want to. It sounds like you would of paid if you had to because it was that important so it really wouldn't of mattered. They could of received your permission and understanding that you might have to pay and then let sales figure it out with you later.

That is my take,
Evan

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panache

one thing I know that can be done with tickets is ownership can be taken... for example, I have a ticket thats sitting in escalated 3rd level support... will I be dealing with that one person for the rest of this ticket? or will it be round robin??

you see for me when a ticket has to go this far past basic 3rd level support, I want to know I am dealing with one person thats taking the responsibility to get me an answer.

I hope thats how surpass has set things up with tickets.

MJ

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Fuyu

I agree that higher levels of support should be serviced by fewer people, a support pyramid of sorts. My recent experiences with support illustrate a pattern of simply not reading through the thread-stream.

I hope it's not because there is a manage-by-numbers policy at the support centers. It's bad enough dealing with the emotions of distressed clients without having to make sure you parse X tickets by the end of your shift or else you get a negative perfomance appraisal. Hopefully the support sub-contract is not pay-per-ticket! Please, take the time you need to resolve the issue without going home and beating your wife and kids!

Having cut them some slack, the definition of the word 'updates' needs to be revisited. As part of the ticket submission process, I'd like to subscribe to feedback level (let me know when it's done/let me know after each milestone/conference me in on skype/skype me in and turn on your webcam/I'm driving right over).

Surpass do a good job. They mean well, which is probably a big part of why they've thrived. It's sad to see defenders of the faith bristle whenever constructive criticism is raised. We all want things to improve.

Thanks Steveorg.

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