Date: Sat, 04 Jan 1997 01:31:14 -0800 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: Annelise Anderson <andrsn@andrsn.stanford.edu> 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: <25593.852370274@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 03 Jan 1997 14:12:03 PST." <Pine.BSI.3.94.970103135245.17913A-100000@andrsn.stanford.edu>
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> 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.
Plus, what happens if the FreeBSD box in question is providing their
sole email connection? That's not at all a far-fetched scenario. :-)
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. 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. :)
>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
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