GEEKNOTE: Organizing For The Unexpected

GEEKNOTE:  Sometimes I feel like I'm Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, or as Yogi Berra was fond of saying:  "It's like Deja Vu all over again." 

I spent part of my weekend once again trying to help one of my customers who thought it would be a good idea to let the yellow page company update his website, even though he saw nothing wrong with the old site.  

I'll bite my tongue and not go into a rant about the insanity of depending on the yellow page company for your business website.  Instead, I will stick to the specific issues with the current disaster:

For the second time this year, they managed to kill his email in the process of working on his website.  The yellow page company is a very large company that wouldn't even talk to us on Friday, so we had to instruct the customer on what to tell them to fix the problem, with the instructions getting relayed several times within the yellow page company.  If you've ever played the "whisper a secret" game as a kid, you know how horribly wrong this is likely to go.  It did.

The fix for our customer's email involved about 30 seconds of work on somebody's part.  The problem was finding that somebody and talking to them directly.  They promised our customer that the problem would be fixed within 24-48 hours, but because of the multiple times the message was relayed, it was incomprehensible to the folks who actually could have fixed the problem.  Two days later, the problem iwas still not fixed, so I started making calls on Sunday afternoon to the yellow page company's support numbers.

After a few calls, I managed to track down a tech in the right department on Sunday and was able to communicate exactly what needed to be fixed.  Once the customer called in and verfied my instructions, the problem was fixed within minutes.

The first thing we are going to do Monday is to sit down with the customer and get a complete list of who he is using for what, including contact names and numbers as well as authorization letters so that we can act on his behalf.

The second thing we are going to do is get access to his domain registration and web hosting control panel information so that we can go in and correct the problem the next time his web host breaks things.  Having to wait days to get a simple change made is simply not acceptable.  Unfortunately, the web hosting company couldn't email him this information because his email was broken...

The underlying problem is one of organization:  This particular customer has been dealing with multiple vendors for his communications and technology needs without anyone plugged in enough to see the whole picture.  Things work fine so long as they don't break.  When something breaks, the first thing he has to do is figure out who is responsible and doing the things that put food on the table so that he can start making phone calls.  Time he spends chasing problems like this is time he isn't spending generating income for himself.

It doesn't have to be this way.  We serve as a single point of contact for a growing number of our customers.  This is the keystone in a managed service relationship.   As a customer's trusted advisor, we take on the coordination role for everything IT and communication related, saving the customer time and aggravation.  They can concentrate on earning money instead of juggling a bunch of stuff that they don't completely understand.  That is what we are going to suggest to this particular customer in the morning.  Give us the contact info and the authorization letters and let us deal with all these companies from here on geek to geek.

Do you try to handle all your IT and communications vendors yourself or have you asked your IT advisor to take on this burden so you can get back to work?  I'd love to hear from you.

As always, feel free to drop me a note or give me a call (847-2424) if you have any questions about your computer or the Internet.

Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek
Gulfcoast Networking, Inc.
http://www.gulfcoastnetworking.com