I can’t find any decent pictures of me in my “Go away or I’ll replace you with a small shell script” tshirt but yesterday I did just that. Part of doing business with OWN is that we trust you to set your own priority for the support requests. If something is urgent, we will handle it right away. If its a high priority case, we’ll work on it before we work on the other normal priority cases. It’s just good business. By setting your own priority you can rest assured that you get the support under an SLA and that when you really have an urgent issue, we’re there for you.

However, customers consider any matter, even a little annoyance, to be urgent to them. Not quite according to the SLA they agree to which defines an urgent issue as something that affects all users and makes it impossible for any work to get done. High priority is given to something that is affecting a large portion of the business. And just in case you’re wondering, no, it’s not urgent if the CEO is an idiot that nuked his entire inbox, if the business goes on the priority is normal.

It’s just human nature for customers to consider themselves the center of the universe and anything that happens to them needs to be handled urgently. Some MSP’s don’t even allow users to set their own priority, they let their staff judge how important something is. To each his own. Here were our support stats for Sunday and Monday:

Sunday: 31 support tickets, 16 urgent, 9 high
Monday: 89 support tickets, 30 urgent, 41 high

So I bounced an email to the Shockey Monkey mailing list and took some quick feedback. The resulting “replace you with a shell script” move is illustrated below:

So I still trust my customers to tell me if something is urgent, or high. But if you go urgent and it just so happens its not urgent according to the SLA (service level agreement) we both entered in…. you get charged. Quick IM over to Dave Sobel to check if this is too rude and with his blessing it went into production around 10 AM EST.

Notice that you are not given a confirmation screen, just an alert. There is some logic behind that. I don’t want to ask you for a permission to agree with the SLA you already agreed to. I don’t want to automatically reset the priority to normal if the $250/hour bs fee doesn’t appeal to you. Perhaps this will make the customer read the priorities and consider where they would put this issue if it were their own IT staff doing it.

Back to the subject: you can address business issues with software, here are the results.

Tuesday: 75 support tickets, 1 urgent, 3 high
Wednesday:  28 support tickets, 0 urgent, 0 high

So we went from total 96 high/urgent priority cases on Sunday Monday, to only 4 after the warning went in. In all fairness, I have to give credit to Erick Simpson whose support portal always shoots back a confirmation email for every new ticket and explains their response time, SLA, etc – I even sent an email over to their support alias to get the threatening text you see up there.

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