Newsletter December 2006
What Happens When You Call Convergence
by Eric Keyser
Incident Manager/Silver Team
Imagine the following situation:
It’s Monday morning, your weekend was too short and now it is back to the workweek’s daily grind. As you are getting organized over a cup of coffee and begin to prepare for the week ahead, you open up your Outlook only to find…nothing. So you try again-still nothing. Your very own case of the Mondays has just arrived, and at this point, you are ready to essentially go insane. So what’s next, right?
It is time to call Convergence. Our job is to help you with your IT tools. We call unexpected IT issues, like the abovementioned situation, an incident. Incidents disrupt your normal workflow and can be caused by bugs, malicious software, or random gremlins. The core of our business is to help you get around these roadblocks and get back to work. Restoring service is our primary concern. After you are up and running, we will work behind the scenes to keep the problem from happening again.
So you might be wondering: What actually happens when disaster strikes and I need to be rescued? In the next few paragraphs, I will delineate the process by which we follow. The goal here is to help shed some light on the mysteries of technical support and why we do things the way we do.
Disaster Strikes
This is when you decide to call us. Minor annoyance or catastrophic failure, you decide that it is time to involve Convergence.
First Contact
You can contact Convergence for support in a couple of ways. You can contact us via phone at 503-906-1515 or via email at support@cnwi.net. Typically, email is the best way for us to be successful. With email you can include screenshots, error messages, and details that are less likely to be misunderstood. However, sometimes it is nice to hear a voice and discuss your issue. So always know that the Convergence Customer Service (CCS) hotline is there for you.
Coding, Priority, and Assignment
Once Customer Service has collected all the initial information, the hard work begins. Our Customer Service team needs to make decisions so that your issue receives the correct attention. At this stage, the more detail provided, the better equipped our team is to make good decisions. First, Customer Service will code your issue by classifying the problem. This helps to match up your issue with similar incidents so we can identify quick fixes or spot a recurring problem. Next, the team sets the priority of the incident. This goes toward placing the incident in the queue and determining response time. Normally, we work incidents in the order in which they were received. However, if something comes up that can impact an entire company or a critical part of the business, we will move the incident up the list. Finally, Customer Service will assign the ticket to the appropriate team: Incident or Request.
Wait Just a Second, Incident or Request? What is the Difference?
Please allow us to define these two terms in more detail. So in order to save confusion when you call us, we have created a single point of contact with the Customer Service team. That way, you do not have to make the distinction when you contact us. The Request Team handles installations, new users, and general account changes. Requests generally take longer and require more lead time to complete. If you know you will have new equipment or a new user, advance notice will help us meet your needs.
The Firefighters
The coding is done, the priority is set, and Customer Service has assigned your ticket to the Incident team. Your issue is visible to this team as a ticket, along with all the other reported incidents that have not yet been processed. Normally, a member of the Incident Team will first scan the summary of the issue and check the coding before deciding how to proceed. Our goal here is to restore service as quickly as possible and get you back to work. We use every tool at our disposal; including research, years of experience, or brute force.
Your Issue is an Enigma
Although it does not happen very often, sometimes your incident can trump all of our best efforts to resolve an issue in a quick and effective manner. Further, sometimes the resolution might be a lengthy process that would impede any given technician from resolving other incidents. In these instances, the Incident Team might decide to escalate your issue. This is a handoff of your issue, usually to your network’s administrator. They will continue to work the problem by perhaps leveraging outside service, technical specialists, or use of detailed knowledge of your network.
Why Can’t all of my Issues go Straight to the Administrator?
If you have employed Convergence for a while, you might have become comfortable with contacting your network’s administrator directly. The reason we moved away from that is a matter of efficiency. Your administrator should be spending most of their time monitoring and maintaining the systems on your network. A direct channel to them severely limits the amount of networks they can manage. For Convergence to provide affordable service, we need to be scalable. That means managing the incidents for many customers, while the administrators manage the networks for a specific subset of all customers. This system allows us to deal with those inevitable everyday issues for a growing number of companies, while still providing top notch network security and performance.
So in a very large nutshell, that is what happens when you call Convergence. Our driving goal is to keep you, the user, productive. Nothing is perfect; your computer is no exception. In the long run, we hope that you will find that Convergence has provided the resources to give you the best technical experience possible.
If you would like to receive more information simply contact us.
What People Are Saying
- “Your technician was wonderful on this issue. He went above and beyond the call of duty and sent me an email with specific details and tips. The upgrade went without a hitch thanks to his foresight. He is a great technician and always one of our favorites because he always gets to the bottom of the issue and is very knowledgeable.”
- Pam Jensen, Crestline Construction Company