Support Blog?

[alberonn]

After the recent debacle I got to thinking. While I thought some of the posts in this forum were appallingly over-dramatic, I personally thought support here was a little slow on the uptake, but appropriate and quite good otherwise. Where things keep falling down is customer relations.

There really needs to be a better method of communicating what's happening to the HostGator customers. The absence of information causes people to speculate and assume the worst.

What I'd like to see is some sort of status page, even just a simple blog. Somewhere that we could see messages like:

We are aware of ?????? problem with ?????? server. We are looking in to it.

The ?????? problem with ?????? server was caused by ??????. It has been resolved and should be back to normal now.

Even the simplest blog software would provide an RSS feed, and some should have an option to email the updates to interested parties. It would probably be best to put this on a neutral server somewhere so it wouldn't be affected by any problems.

Of course to be useful, it would actually have to be used and prominent and easy to find for the customers.

Other than that, I'd rather see the support people working to fix the problem rather than personally responding to 100 people demanding an explanation.

[Eric]

I agree with you there. It would be great to know when updates were happening (meaning no cause for worry) or when the server is just down. An RSS feed would probably be the most convenient too, not to mention easy to setup and use.

[quietFinn]

One thing they could do is to lock the thread where they (HG support staff) tell what's going on, and always create another, a discussion thread, and provide a link to that.

[slapshotw]

I agree with quietfinn-- the same thing can be done using the forum and locked threads. They have the software, they just need to use it a bit better.

That said, I was happy to hear that they brought in additional help last night when they needed it, and, towards the end, we got good updates. That says a lot to me.

[gdwoods]

They tried that once before, remember?

see: http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=9602

It was never implemented...

[alberonn]

Originally Posted by gdwoods

They tried that once before, remember?

see: http://forums.hostgator.com/showthread.php?t=9602

It was never implemented...

Yeah, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to bring it up again.

It actually was implemented across the majority of our shared servers.

I discussed it earlier today with the CTO and again it's still something that we want to have up and running on a larger scale.

The problem with getting it implemented is actually getting employees to use it each time modifications are made.

[TOTALLYTOSHIBA]

Surely if staff are paid to do a Job then it gets done...

I think thats a very lame excuse.

This isnt somthing that needs to be thought about its somthing that needs to be added

[kmaw]

I know some things are easier said than done... but it seems to me if the boss tells you to do something like that after each job, you do it... otherwise there's always someone to replace you

[gdwoods]

"all Employees Must Wash Hands After Using The Restrooms And Must Post To The Support Blog!!! "

:d

It essentially hasn't occurred as it was more of an 'unofficial' implementation. I'm still awaiting it to get announced and launched across all of the reseller servers as well.

Again, it's something that I will ensure gets implemented as thorough, up to date information is going to decrease the workload of the technicians and increase the communication levels we provide each client.

If you want to send off a few letters of support to let Brent know that you would like something implemented he's available directly at brent@hostgator.com



Note: I wish we had a blog too -- it'd be great to add some insight into what we're up to. We're huddled around tickets fairly often but we always have new goodies coming up.