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MXRoute Support
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@MrGeneral @MikePT help this man.
@jarland
https://blog.mxroute.com/2018/03/the-state-of-mxroute-customer-support
have you tried a six pack?
Francisco
@shimabuka What is the actual issue you are seeing? If it isn't specific to the service being unreachable and is instead a question about how to configure the service or similar, maybe someone here would be able to answer your questions for you more quickly? Since you already have the thread open and it is obvious that MXroute is a bit backlogged, might as well let us know the issue as well so we can attempt to help!
Cheers!
Scam
@jarland
is @MikePT not doing support anymore ?
Deadpool
Customer support is a dark side of every startup managed by a small team [of one].
You wanna do some cool stuff, r&d, but they are writing and writing...
About how many clients are you talking about? I have experience when I was one faced 18k client base ALONE from 8:00 up to 22:00 7 day per week for more than few years and it was not a problem at all.
What about real-time talks, I was able to manage up to 1k customers at the same time, all of their problems and needs related to my product and my work. I mean I did not talk with 1k people at the same time, but they were around me and asking for a help.
Another my project, I was able at peak hours to take up to 30-40 messages in less than 1-2 minutes and in around 5-6 minutes solve them all.
There is always around 80% of problems that can be solved in few sentences or less than 20 seconds with good organization.
How so big amount of really headache support requests has been resolved? In different cases by different methods. The most important thing what need to do first is:
around 80% (based on paretto and (my own experience confirm it too) requests are just mess and trash and can be solved very easy).
Other 20% of requests need some investigation and time.
But mostly in 99% cases when you talk with a client you are losing A LOT of time just to find out where is a problem. This is the most problematic thing.
Even if the problem with some really stupid thing, while you will get what is wrong with a client, you will lose a lot of time what you can spend for around 20-30 clients or more.
How we solved so big mess or issues at peak hours?
Some guy made custom billing and support system with suggestions in the reply based on words from the message, so clients mostly got their answer when they ask automatically.
Very very good thing is a countdown timer and limitations (client MUST be informed about it) how many time YOU MAXIMUM can spend for him. Around 120 seconds is MORE than enough for mostly all typical cases, before transferring a client to another wave of support.
At fourth place, but the number 1 in priority thing it is about service quality. If you doing the really BAD job, you will always have A LOT OF MESSAGES, and tickets. Tune your work and make it great.
Hire more employers. Support department usually costs really small amount of money everywhere. You can even hire off-shore co-workers from ex-USSR countries where a lot really talented and quality professionals which for some not big (if compare to EU / USA salary (can be 1\10 of average salary in your country)) money can solve your problems and headache. A lot of companies, really a lot of companies using it, and their quality not downgraded. But you must to build your own business process with writing a script with block schemes of questions/answers and so on to make sure that everything is good.
Overall personally me, as the guy who was work alone at support department, and at different own and not owns projects with the large audience I can't accept a thing when someone answering in more then 24 hours, even if he doing the job alone. If the guy receive (business owner) more than 3k$ / mo from a project what he is doing for large audience, and can't serve his client-base, why not to split this 3k$ to 2.5k$ for you and 500$ for offshore co-worker who will do the same thing what you will do, and you will load-balance whole flow of client problems?
We also have a Discord chat where we can crowd source knowledge, and I may be more available most days to answer quick questions on it:
https://discord.gg/UyBEFG7
A discord chat message can be visible to others, potentially answering that question for more than one person at a time. Additionally, this is the kind of thing I can toss out quick answers to in a less formal manner than I can tickets.
Of course, not everything will be appropriate for Discord, and in such a case I will get to your ticket as quickly as I can. If you need to go the extra mile to make sure it crosses my eyes, I won't judge you for it under these conditions. I try my very best to get to every urgent ticket with the smallest of delays, but I can make a mistake or fail to judge it's importance to you.
To clarify what I consider urgent, anything that breaks your ability to actually use the service and has no valid short term workaround that you are able to use and aware of. This excludes one event that might confuse people, blocked outbound "test" emails, which are by definition unimportant and not worthy of treating highly. (People often get confused about the state of one outbound email and then send a bunch of "test" emails which get blocked by MailChannels, therefore "proving" that outbound email is broken)
Some personal stuff going on, he deserves all of your positive wishes.
I'm having trouble understanding that. Most tickets I've answered in my life took more than 120 seconds, some of them much more. Even if some took less and the rest are "transferred to another wave of support", how do you handle them post-transfer?
Easy to talk a big game when you don't make your own products (it's more than "just cPanel"), you have "another wave of support" to ditch things to, and you don't mind providing poor quality support and hiring someone for pennies in a country with no labor standards (who almost entirely consist of people barely trained to handle cPanel without modifications, but that's another thing entirely).
No thanks. I'll do it my way and get out of this mess with my own two hands. MXroute will be praised for it's support, this path defined on my blog is sound. It just has a delay on resolving outstanding issues. I'm apologetic for where I'm at, but by no means defeated.
The same, around 10k customers (who pay).
Well, [good] phone customer support would add $$$ to their bills.
I'm from ex-USSR and yes, a lof of smart people (I went to the same school as the creator of NGINX, he is from kazakhstan).
Go to russian freelance websites and hire some people. Namecheap has an office in Moscow (tech support, domain support, remote system admins).
I don't get this either. The usual ticket that can't be solved in 120 seconds is "my XYZ is down, I'm losing millions!!1!". I check the service and yes it's down, I look at the logs and yes something is whack and it's not obvious why, you can't just restart the service without first figuring out and fixing the problem, the person really is fucked while the service is down, so resolving it has higher priority rather than lower. It has more than once resulted in finding bugs in vendor software.
Tonight before I called it a night on that front, I came across two tickets reporting an odd issue with just one server. The times were similar. No logs of the issue or showing any other issue at the time. The correlation looks suspiciously like a DNS resolution error where perhaps one needs to be using the right resolvers at the right time to see the failure, and having multiple customers using those resolvers, being provisioned on this server, and attempting to connect at the same time is an ask too large, so a couple of reports may be the best I get to alert me to the presence of a possible issue.
Of course, standard support: Server is online, bye.
But no, I performed a wealth of DNS tests on popular resolvers from several geographic locations to combine the results, attempting to reproduce the possibility of a vague issue that I might not get to catch otherwise, that I might not post on a status page because until confirmed there is technically "no issue."
Anyone dealing with that in 120s without using my example of "standard support" has my respect. Anyone weighing in on how long they think it should take me to handle tickets has never been in my shoes. Much love to all, but know that there's a lot that goes into my work
But I thought MXroute was great. Now it turns out you'll be waiting months on a ticket? Perhaps just running your own mail server was the right idea after all.
3 days I've been waiting for 12 days from another provider.
Sure, but I think most people bought it to send and receive email rather than as a conversation starter with me :P
Other people expect from me to be serious and keep my promises, they don't like excuses. I therefore expect other people to keep their promises too, I don't like excuses, like the ones @jarland implies.
You’ve gone from a loveable curmudgeon to a miserable prick.
BTW, there’s something on your shoulder.
@default nice expectations for $10/year.
If some of the members of lowendtalk were forced to deal with UK ISP's ... lol, this place would chill the fuck out overnight.
It's not about money, it's about being serious and delivering expectations when doing business.
because bad service elsewhere should prepare people to accept bad service here?
There is also the option to answer the customer that you will be looking into it with more extensive tests and set the ticket to "in progress".
The customer has got their "120-second" reply and you bought some time to do your tests.
Even better is to give an estimate of the time needed to do the tests ... but that is a perfect world
Every time I hear someone telling me that they got bad support somewhere else, I always smirk and reply "didn't you learn something from that experience on how to treat your customers"
Its called perspective, something we have all known for a long time a few people here lack.