Initial repsonse of live-chat operators

[Jester]

I am sure that I am not alone when I say, that as owner of a website, you get to know it quite well - you know when its running efficiently and when it is lagging and its feeling a bit "sick".

During my numerous years with EUKhost and my multiple servers I have experienced elements of downtime due to hardware or system failures. This is the nature of the beast and to a dergee I accept that.

What I tend to find, is that usually a day before a big "fail" I get intermittent issues reported by my users, and usually massive slowdowns and potentially outages coupled with a high server load.

These, I would describe as "warning signs" of something bad about to happen - especially if nothing has been changed on the website and there has be no updates or increase in traffic.

So, when I jump on livechat, I get forever annoyed when the response I receive is "You've run out of RAM". No - A system that been stable for a fair period of time and that utilises a steady 50% of available resources doesn't just decide to take more to the point where it makes itself fall over.

Twice in the past I've actually paid money to increase my resources as a fix on the recommendation of Live Chat - where in hindsight, it was probably down to a potential hardware error.

The same occured yesterday. I changed my eNlight settings to boost resources after being told "You are out of RAM" - when I could see for myself, that wasn't the case.

My whole server then fell over completely today - and I've had hours of downtime on a cloud server. So I am not happy... however, that is a different issue that i'll be talking to others about elsewhere.

So where is this leading?

Well, can you please provide an element of re-training to your L1 initial response staff on Live Chat, so that when a customer says that a previously happy server suddenly isn't working as it should, that rather than just sell them an upgrade or blame the active users on the server, to instead refer the server to be checked by a senior admin. Surely catching a problem in the bud is to everyone's advantage.

Thank you for reading.


James

[DPS Computing]

Hi James,

Sorry to hear of the problems that you have faced. I do agree with what you say, as long as there is no major changes on a server and it has worked well in the past there isn't a reason for it not to continue to work well in the future.

Just to play devils advocate, there are no other potential causes are there (malicious script injection, certain processes massively increasing resource usage etc)? I'm sure that you have already verified that these are not an issue but just thought I'd mention it.

I'm sure someone from the eUK staff will be along shortly to address your post .

[eUk-Reeve]

Hello James,

I have opened a support ticket :: SHV-183-90726 on your behalf and I have ask our Enlight experts to look into your issue and they will get back to you in the same ticket as soon as possible.

[Jester]

@DPS

Yeah - always a possibility, but not in this instant.. and its something I mention to Live Chat when they are initially looking into a problem. It's hard to check what is up when your Average Loads are like 200 200 200 (as it was today!)

I'd like to say: I'm not moaning about support generally - Through all the high and lows, EUKhost is amazing value for money - but little tweaks can make a HUGE difference to customer's experience.

For the record, Thomas has been looking into what went wrong - and he's an absolute star. However, it's that initial first contact with support.. it's like sometimes, you have to fight to have the problem escalated.


@Reeve

Thank you - I think Thomas will probably email me with any updates, but its good to have an official ticket. Much appreciated.

[eUKhost.com]

Hi James,

I am 100% with you on what you have said. We deal with hundreds of chats daily, where most of the customers initiate the chat assuming their server might crash or has crashed. I've recently initiated a new process in our CRM system, where each of our customer will get rating and feedback from the senior technical staff. Earlier we had less people in the support team, so almost everyone knew the regular customers and their expectations, but now we have 100+ people working on the helpdesk and livechat, so we have initiated a new process where we will make a profile of each of our customer and that information will be fetched once you initiate a chat or open a ticket.

We will need at least 2 - 3 months to create a proper feedback system and give technical rating to each of our customer.

I would suggest you to ask for a L2 or L3 level person as soon as you come on livechat, this will help us to assign the best people to resolve your technical problems. You can also trust our Ticket system completely, as we don't make mistakes when it comes to answering tickets. Livechats need instant response, so it becomes difficult for the livechat staff to troubleshoot complicated problems and also keep the customers updated at the same time. alternatively you can tell the livechat staff members that you can wait till the problem is identified, you can ask them to run "Disk Check" scripts and ask them to send a report to you. Hardware diagnosis tests take long time to run on the server, so the best option to get your hardware checked is to submit a ticket.

so here's a summary of what I would suggest :-

1. Open a ticket for complicated technical problems or Hardware Diagnosis.
2. Request the livechat staff to escalate your chat to a L2 or L3 person.
3. always leave your feedback when you close the livechat.
4. Inform the livechat staff in advance that you are a technically sound customer and you have a fair idea of what exactly must have gone wrong with your server/VM.

I hope this helps.

[ejsolutions]

... we will make a profile of each of our customer and that information will be fetched once you initiate a chat or open a ticket.

Oh oh, that's a big red marker against me ,then!






[Good plan though.]

[eUKhost.com]

Oh oh, that's a big red marker against me ,then!






[Good plan though.]

haha

your chats and tickets will directly go to our L3's, I won't like to deal with your technical tickets.

[DPS Computing]

@DPS

Yeah - always a possibility, but not in this instant.. and its something I mention to Live Chat when they are initially looking into a problem. It's hard to check what is up when your Average Loads are like 200 200 200 (as it was today!)

I'd like to say: I'm not moaning about support generally - Through all the high and lows, EUKhost is amazing value for money - but little tweaks can make a HUGE difference to customer's experience.

For the record, Thomas has been looking into what went wrong - and he's an absolute star. However, it's that initial first contact with support.. it's like sometimes, you have to fight to have the problem escalated.


@Reeve

Thank you - I think Thomas will probably email me with any updates, but its good to have an official ticket. Much appreciated.

Yeah, I assumed that you would have already checked. And yeah 200 200 200 is a little on the high side to do anything .

I can definitely see where you are coming from. I hope that support manage to rectify all your problems for you soon .

And Mark: I like the profiling idea. I think some of the profiles would make quite an amusing bit of bedtime reading haha.

[ajbird]

surely under data protection you will need to publish these if requested..

so.. probably best to remove the 'ID10T' flag... just in case

[Ben Stones]

surely under data protection you will need to publish these if requested..

so.. probably best to remove the 'ID10T' flag... just in case

lol .

I think we would need to comply with any subject access request under the Data Protection Act irregardless if we add this provision to make it more convenient for customers who have more technical experience .

[DPS Computing]

surely under data protection you will need to publish these if requested..

so.. probably best to remove the 'ID10T' flag... just in case

Roflmao, it'd have to be encrypted if that flag was going to be kept on file .

lol .

I think we would need to comply with any subject access request under the Data Protection Act irregardless if we add this provision to make it more convenient for customers who have more technical experience .

Yeah.

And I'm sure no files will accidentally get dropped in the shredder after such request lol. (btw, just to be clear I am not implying that eUKhost would do this!).