Being involved in most all aspects of the operations of 1-800-HOSTING I get to feel firsthand the impact of having disparate data sources, or not having proper information for processes you would like to apply metrics to. Trying to make decisions without having reliable and useful data is almost pointless if you don’t know where you’ve been then how do you know where you are going? A good example is our previous phone system that was in operation when I started with 1-800-HOSTING many years ago.
When I first started we had no idea how many calls we received, made, abandoned, or were forced to hold each day. Running a contact center where customers are invited to call us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and 365 days a year with a phone number such as 1-800-HOSTING, and then no way to measure our performance and the customer experience seemed a bit odd. Fast forward and we now we have the ability to measure, report, and convey our progress to our employees and customers a like.
Previous 30 day statistics:
- SLA (Calls answered in 20 seconds or less): 95%
- Average Wait for Answered Calls: :11s
This is information that has a direct impact on the customers experience by allowing us to adjust schedules of the technical support, sales, and billing staff members based on when our customers contact us most.
The other problem that we, and every other company out there faces, is allowing for internal and external systems to share related information rather than manually replicating it. While I am not a application developer, I do have a pretty good understanding of how information “should” flow between all of the systems we employ, and know it can always be improved. Automation and systems integration are a key focus here at 1-800-HOSTING and we are working hard to integrate as many functions as we can to save both time and money.
Here is a short list of some of the software and systems we use:
Billing and Customer Account System
- The Request Tracker Ticketing System
- Network and Server Monitoring Systems
- Server Deployment Environment
- Network Statistics Reporting
- Network Device Management
- Datacenter Management Software
- Website Statistics System
- Authentication Systems
The goal is to never have to enter the same bit of information more than once and then ultimately in the same place. While many of our systems share this philosophy there is still a lot of work to be done towards total company automation.
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