Cobweb Support

Phew What a day - CRM Goes Live

Well the day started around 5am, I was lying in bed and had woken up for the 3rd time that morning after having the recurring nightmare that the CRM servers were going to die on me, the training that had been given would disappear from everyone’s mind.   Talk about glass half empty....

It turned out that I didn’t need to worry half as much as I did.  I arrived on site and started to run through the checks.

A few moments later Melissa turned up to do the decoration, balloons and CRM Survival packs were distributed then Leighton (Our appointed CRM training guru and all round nice guy, looking as nervous as myself I might add). 

We did our final pre flight checks and then it happened, Emma on the Service Desk got our first call that needed to be logged into the Service Desk.  All went well, the world didn’t end and then the day just happened.  Within the next 30 minutes the hive of activity that was the Service Desk was there and people were asking questions, suggesting improvements, listening to feedback from customers, I even hear that some of our customers were asking about when we were going to sell MS CRM Dynamics as a service.

The day certainly didn’t go without hitch and there is some process items to sort and some of the functionality didn’t work exactly as we thought, you just got to love technology, but at no point did we even consider rolling back.

I think the comment of the day yesterday that stuck with me was......

"We did well; we didn't change the world but we the world didn’t end"

We have had some comments from our customers that have increased our confidence even further that we are doing the right thing by making this change..

This from someone who received one of our notifications from CRM telling them who their case owner was

"WOW…

This is really impressive – if you could feed this back to the team and James I’m sure it will make their day.

It has a wonderful human touch to it – makes it feel like we’re dealing with a person rather than a service / team. Looking forward to more and more positive changes like this one. (if this is as a result of moving over to CRM?)

Just the perfect level of detail that we all appreciate and love to see – keep it going

Well done"

If any of our customers have any feedback positive or challenging on our rollout of MS CRM then please do not hesiate to contact our Service team at Support@cobweb.com

Thanks

Kev Gower

CRM Launch Day - pictures

The Service Desk first thing this morning - the CRM balloon machine has arrived

There are floor-walkers on hand to provide support if you need it.... Ryan needs help :-(

The Service Desk later this morning.

Kev's Tool Time (we're making things better!)

This week we are completing the next major stage of our update to our customer management system to use Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We've been using CRM to manage our Sales process (leads to opportunities) and Account Management functions for about a year now. In that time we've learnt a lot about CRM, customisation and process implementation. Now it's time for the customer support tools!

The delivery of our new tools is being managed by Kev Gower (hence the title) and delivered by a team of CRM champions across Cobweb.

We aim to make this change seamless to all customers, however, during this time you may notice some changes when dealing with our customer service agents. They are using new tools and are subject to some changes in working practive. We will be actively monitoring the customer experience during this time of change and we've put the whole company through a number of training sessions.

We're having a bit of a "we love CRM" party with a few launch events so I'll post some pictures of the office and the teams in action. Feedback of all type is always welcome and encouraged by sending an email to support@cobweb.com, by speaking to your Account Manager, or leaving a comment on our blog.

Thank you for your continued cooperation.
Dan Germain - Operations Director and Innovation Lead

Office 2007 SP1 has been released (don't tell anyone)

Maybe it's because it was Christmas, but I didn't notice the usual Microsoft fanfare when Office 2007 SP1 was released in mid-December.  It's available for download from Microsoft and it's installed with Windows Update, i must have missed the general announcements.

There are a host of stability and performance improvements, plus some security updates too.  Some quick Outlook 2007 SP1 Facts for you all;

• General performance and responsiveness improvements
• POP3 mail download improvements
• Improved support for RSS feeds
• Meeting reliability improvements

I installed it about a week ago and all seem well so far... i'd recommend you give it a go.

your mailbox... too_many_items = too_slow!

Disk performance aka IO or IOPS is really important for Exchange; that’s why our biggest expenditure is our fibre-channel SAN storage.  Storage IO is not just about the size of the mailboxes, but the number of items in your critical folders, as well as the client type that can cause a disk performance impact.

As your mailbox size increases, the item count becomes critical.  The load on the disk is shifted from the Exchange server to the Outlook client and local machine. This means that having a large number of items in your Inbox, or an end-user searching a mailbox will have little effect on the server. This also means that Cached Mode users with large mailboxes may need faster computers than those with small mailboxes!!!

Here’s the unofficial Microsoft recommendation from within the Exchange Team

I usually recommend no more than about 2500 - 5000 messages in any of the critical path folders.  The critical path folders are the Calendar, Contacts, Inbox, and Sent Item folder. Ideally, keep the Inbox, Contacts and Calendar to 1000 or less.

If you’re using Outlook 2007 then here are the recommendations for running in Cached-mode on a client PC.   You need to make sure you've got the RAM and the disk to take the pace...

Mailbox Size	Memory Size	Hard Disk Speed
1GB	1GB	5400RPM
2GB	1-2GB	7200RPM
>2GB	Reduce mailbox size, or use online mode. Your mileage may vary based on your specific hardware and performance threshold.

Ref: http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2005/03/14/395229.aspx

Your pizza is in the oven

I found this interesting... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/16/dominos_txt_service/ it's simple, Dominos  are taking orders and giving you status updates by SMS now  "your pizza is in the oven".     

While this is fine for Pizza, I'm wondering if you could really make SMS communications reliable and trustworthy for business to use?   At Cobweb we have an SMS subscription service for service updates, notifications, maintenance notices etc. but we get feedback that it's not totally reliable (numbers change, networks delay messages, phones need a signal) and the systems and interfaces aren't in place to provide the tools to manage your subscriptions yet.

Text to a mobile is an instant pager alert and certainly has more impact than email now, but have mobile devices and 24/7 email started to replace SMS?  Would you send us a support request or problem ticket via SMS? useful if your email isn't working I suppose!   My thoughts are that it's not as reliable/traceable as email or the phone and the last thing anybody wants are lost communications..

L8r ;-)

Dan

You need this!!! Online training for "Getting the best from Microsoft Office"

There are some great training and tips available from Microsoft to help you get the most from Microsoft Office & Outlook.    Anything that saves time is good with me!

Demo videos - http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/CH011218061033.aspx
Flag it, Find it, File it fast
Make the most of 15 minutes with Outlook 2003

Great WebCast - Top 10 Tips to Save Time in Outlook

We're putting the best of these in our KnowledgeBase which is accessible from www.cobweb.com/support

If you find any more, especially ones that are better, please post a comment and let me know!

Friday - International SysAdmin Appreciation Day!

We're having a day of celebration today – the 8t Annual International SysAdmin Appreciation Day! 

We've already started with breakfast from McD’s, doughnuts for the company round and home-made sysadmin cake!

So, well done to all our sysadmins who tirelessly keep our systems and networks running 24/7 - Wayne, Oli, Mat, Mike, Dan, Matt, Keir, Kelvin, Jim, David, Stephen, Jen, Tom & Paul;

you rock!

Service is a feeling....

What is great customer service.

The question of all questions. 

We all crave it whether that be emailing a service desk, purchasing an item online or buying a burger, but just what is it?  In all these scenario's the common ground is, if you receive good Customer service you know it, it makes you feel like someone cares about your request or issue and that they have taken the time to make sure that they have delivered to meet or exceed your expectations.

So how does this fit in with this blog.

My role at Cobweb is all about Service Support and exceeding Customer expectation, my experience has shown me that no matter how good a service is,no matter what it costs its the way you care for your customers and how you communicate with your customers will be the defining factor that sets you apart from the others, but.... there is always a but..... do we tell people enough when things go right and things go wrong?  A challenge I have always faced is finding out from customers what they really think and to me its the most important piece of data that I could ever have. 

My belief is that all feedback is good feedback, if a Customer is satisfied and wants to tell us how well we have done then as in all walks of life its great to hear when you are doing well, if a Customer is dissatisfied then it gives me and my team a clear indication on what we have to do to change that feeling. 

I'm interested in all feedback from everyone so if you have any then please contact me kev.gower@cobweb.com .  I want to work with you all to achieve the excellent Customer service that myself and my team strive to deliver.  We will make mistakes as everyone does, I like to think its how we learn from those experiences good or bad that will set us apart.

Thanks

Kev Gower

Service Desk Manager.

Uptime, resilience and redundancy – how we aim for 100% but issues do occur...

Link: Cobweb Group Service Status.

At Cobweb, we use our Service Status site to keep our customers up to date with any issues that maybe affecting the performance or availability of our platform.

We always aim to provide the most up to date information and also include incidents that are not full outages to a platform.  We include “degraded service performance” and incidents that affect “multiple users” but not necessarily all users.   Thankfully, our incidents are very-rarely platform-wide as they typically affect a single web server, a front-end Exchange server or a Back-end cluster.   We have architected our platform to seamlessly handle these failures within Windows, IIS and Exchange. 

Here is some further information that helps provide an insight in to our service availability and our response to issues when they arise.

• Uptime, resilience and redundancy – how we aim for 100% but issues do occur
  1. Our architecture for Exchange is designed to provide no single points of failure, and to provide resilience and performance with platform scale.   Our primary Hosted Exchange platform has many front-end Exchange servers for client connections (RPC, OWA, ActiveSync, POP3, IMAP), several backend mailbox clusters (2 node active/passive clusters, all quad-processor), Active Directory has DC in double-figures, half of which are dedicated Global Catalogue servers for client directory lookups
  2. All Exchange platform hardware is HP ProLiant DL G4/G5 servers hosted in a long-established Tier-4 DC
  3. These principles of architecture apply to all of our infrastructure – networking for example uses the best ISP-level hardware from Cisco, Nortel and Nokia, our core SAN storage is from EMC
• The user experience and impact when we have downtime
  1. Users running in the recommended configuration, i.e.  Outlook 2003/2007 with Cached Exchange Mode, users will be disconnected from the Exchange server but their local mailbox will still work for cached emails.   Outlook will reconnect automatically and send/receive again.   If our incident is a front-end drop-out then this is usually a disconnect for typically 30 seconds or so.
  2. Backend failovers, when a major service fails such as System Attendant this will cause disconnection for around 5-10 minutes until the Exchange services are online again.   Users can force reconnection to the Exchange server.   Customers with faster connection and lower latency tend to reconnect faster than small office on small/home ADSL.