Date: Sat, 4 Jan 1997 21:39:16 -0800 (PST) From: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>, Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD into larget corp. environment? Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.94.970104212237.22115A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu> In-Reply-To: <25593.852370274@time.cdrom.com>
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On Sat, 4 Jan 1997, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:
> > I'm not convinced about this. It might be possible to do it without
> > front-line tech support people and without an office and a pbx; just
> > with electronic mail. Then it's not 9-5, it's 24/7. Clients would
>
> Well, I just don't have a lot of faith in the amount of "comfort
> factor" we could truly provide (and morally sell) with purely
> email-based tech support. FreeBSD itself is a complicated product and
> PCs don't make it any easier by being festering lesions on the face of
> the computer industry, the closest thing to a social disease it's
> possible to catch with hardware alone. There are just so many
> questions you need to ask in diagnosing a mystery problem ("Hey, my
> Feeg & Elmer Datahumper 9000 PC Clone spontaneously reboots every
> weekday at 9:37am and at 4:53pm the 3rd sunday of every month!") that
> email quickly becomes frustrating to both parties. There's just no
> substitute for voice.
Actually I wasn't suggesting e-mail only; I was suggesting e-mail as
an initial point of contact: a list on which a request for help went
out that got replied to by one or more people. The client and the
expert can then use whatever forms of communication they find useful.
Phone, fax, e-mail, and, what may be the best, irc! irc is
interactive, unix commands can be run and the output put on the screen,
files can be exchanged.
>
> Plus, what happens if the FreeBSD box in question is providing their
> sole email connection? That's not at all a far-fetched scenario. :-)
Well, one can't solve all contingencies in advance. But maybe the
initial advice ought to be to establish another e-mail connection.
>
> Don't get me wrong, I far prefer the esthetically pleasing lines of a
> company with no offices and a purely virtual presence, overheads
> practically nil, but I just don't think it's going to work for the
> kinds of customers who need this service most. I can see an
> email-only contract being an *option* for those folks who truly do
> just need a hand from time to time and are otherwise experts who can
> handle their own shops just fine, thank you very much, but that hardly
> describes your average customer.
>
> I think the front line phone-in tech support is pretty much mandatory,
> and it's not something that I think it'd be possible to outsource,
> either.
My view is that phone-in tech support (as an initial contact) is
an inherently flawed approach. You cannot possibly pay what anyone
good enough can get doing other work (nor would they want to do it).
It is especially problematic with a small staff. The person who
really knows the answer is invariably at lunch, talking to someone
else, or worked the early shift and has already gone home.
And you do need shifts--somebody has the get to work on the West
Coast at 6 a.m. to talk to the folks on the East Coast. And that
just the United States.
The calls come in unevenly (Poisson distribution or something, as
I recall) so you need an answering machine--and someone has to listen
to it and prioritize calls. By the time you call back, they've gone
to lunch. Or they're on hold for half an hour. That's expensive.
>Knowing the kinds of questions the customers are asking and
> what their problems are is pretty invaluable information at the start,
> and a 3rd party call center just adds another layer of insulation that
> you could really do without.
>
> The other problem with wholly-distributed phone-in tech support is
> that managing it becomes a nightmare. How do you know how effective
> your tech support is? Are the customers ending most of their calls
> happily with your engineers? How long does each call take? Are
> questions being properly assigned to the right people by the
> front-line TSRs? If you don't get a handle on those issues pretty
> early in the game, your operating costs go way out of control as the
> consultants bill a lot of hours in avoidable wastage. I'd want to be
> working in the same offices as the tech support department for the
> first 6 months, at least, let's put it that way. :)
I agree you can't do "distributed" phone support. But as far as
finding out if they're happy, that's easy. You send them an e-mail
message and ask them.
Let's see, three people--Brian Tao, Francisco Reyes, and Annelise
Anderson--have now suggested getting rid of the office overhead.
But the point is really to do something rather than nothing, and
starting with phone-in tech support from an office is sufficiently
daunting in terms of costs and organization that it is unlikely to
get done at all. And it seems important that something be offered,
even if it is not perfect.
>
> >Billing and paying should scale to the volume of business.
>
> Oh, absolutely. I'm just trying to establish some reasonable minimums
> here. :-) The maximums are a little easier, since that starts to fall
> into more straight-forward hourly CE billing / group of highly paid
> contractors who fly here and there as needed arrangement.
>
> Jordan
>
Annelise
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