Author: Chimpie

Categories
General Webhosting

Tips on creating a great support ticket

When I read forums of different webhosting companies I often read posts from customers who are upset because they haven’t received a solution to their support tickets quick enough.  Quite often they blame the support techs or the webhosting company as whole.  After diving into the issue I find that most of the time the customer hasn’t provided the correct information up front.  Both the customer and the support techs would love to solve the issue during the first interaction. Meaning, customer submits a ticket, tech responds, issue solved.  The result: the customer is thrilled and the support tech can move onto the next issue.

So let’s figure out what makes a great support ticket so we can get an issue solved as soon as possible.

When you first submit a ticket, give any pertinent information up front.  There are two pieces of information that should be included with every support ticket:

  • What domain(s) you are having problems with
  • What server are you using

Giving these two pieces of information up front can allow the tech to start looking in the proper direction. Once you’ve done that it’s now time to start explaining what the issue is.

What are you experiencing?
How you begin to explain your issue can make or break your support ticket.  It’s important to give detailed information, but be brief about it.  The support tech doesn’t want to read a story.  They want to learn what the problem is and what you have tried so they can get to solving it.  Use bullet points to describe your issue if possible.

What have you tried?
When describing your issue, let the tech know what variations you’ve tried.

For example: You’re having trouble viewing images on a particular webpage.

  • What browsers have you tried (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, etc.)?
  • And what versions? (IE6, IE7, IE8)
  • What did you experience with each browser?

Is this a new issue?
When describing your issue, let them know if this is something new.  This is not to give your issue higher preference, but it will give the tech something to research.  Were any mod_security rules recently changed? Did any software recently get upgraded?  Did any hardware recently get replaced?

Don’t update your support ticket unless you absolutely have to.
Updating your support ticket actually pushes the ticket to the bottom of the queue.  Why?  When ticket systems first came out, adding information to your ticket bumped it to the top.  Customers quickly caught on and constantly added information just to bump it to the top.  This was unfair and system coders reversed this. Now it takes your ticket to the bottom.  Why someone hasn’t fixed this where it doesn’t change your position in the queue is beyond me.  But it is what it is, so take my advice and don’t add information to your ticket unless a staff member adds something to it first.

Turn-offs
Nothing turns off a reader faster than a ticket full of CAPS, excessive punctuation (??!??!!?), name calling, blaming a company or the techs in general, etc.  A good support tech already feels bad that you’re having problems.  Don’t make his or her life more difficult by blaming them for things they might not have done personally.

Before you hit submit
Now that you’ve completed writing your support ticket, take a moment and reread what you wrote.  Make sure that everything your wrote is correct and that you didn’t leave anything out.  Make sure that you’ve used proper spelling, spacing and punctuation.  The easier it is to read your ticket, the easier it is to solve it.

Let’s review:

  • Don’t write a story
  • No large paragraphs
  • Use bullet points
  • Explain what you’re experiencing
  • What have you tried
  • Is this a new issue
  • No screaming
  • No yelling
  • No name calling
  • No cussing
  • Use proper punctuation
  • Use proper spacing
  • Use proper spelling

Submit your ticket
Once you’ve checked and rechecked your support ticket it’s time to send it off.  Click submit, send or whatever the system uses and go grab your favorite beverage.  Most webhosting companies say they’ll answer your ticket in 24 hours.  Most good ones will answer in less than an hour.  Don’t start freaking out if you don’t get a response right away.  They may be working on other, more major issues.  They may be taking more time on yours.  Rest assure that they want your server and your sites running as smoothly as you do.

Issue resolved
Once your issue is resolved, don’t hesitate to provide feedback – good or bad.  This is how companies and techs improve. If you feel that something could have gone better, let them know.  If you were blown away by the quality of service you received, let them know that too.

That does it for this entry.  If you enjoyed this article please help me promote my site by clicking on one of the buttons below.

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Categories
General Lakewood Ranch Movie Reviews

48 Hour Guerrilla Film Competition

The Ask Chimpie mailbag is already receiving mail, so let’s jump in and answer one.

Did you enjoy the 48 Hour Guerrilla Film Competition showing?

Yeah, it was a lot of fun.  For those who don’t know what the 48GFC is, let me explain.

The 48GFC is a two day competition where film makers form teams to write, shoot and edit a short film in 48 hours.  Both amateur and professional groups are welcome to join in.

On Friday, May 21st, 2010, each team sent one person to the Burn’s Court Cinemas to pick up their packet of information. Inside was the genre of the movie and one random line of dialog. The genre and line are kept secret until you pick up the packet to keep it fair for everyone.

Over the next 48 hours the team must write dialog, shoot all new footage (no stock footage allowed), edit and submit their movies back at Burn’s Court Cinemas before the deadline passes.

This year ten teams submitted films and they were all shown this morning at Lakewood Ranch Cinemas.  This was the second time I attended a 48GFC showing.  Just like the first time, I thought it was amazing how the teams can produce these films so quickly.  Most were very funny and overall I had a great time.

So which ones were my favorites?  I can think of three that really stood out, and these are in no particular order…
Driving Mr. Davey
Incorruptible
Whatever it Takes

Thumbs up to all of the teams.  Each of you should be proud.

Links of interest:
48gfc.com
facebook.com/48gfc
twitter.com/48gfc
If you’d like to submit a question for me to answer, follow the link below…
www.chimpie.com/ask-chimpie

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Categories
General HTC Droid Eris

Chimpie’s review of HTC Droid Eris 2.1 firmware upgrade

I purchase my HTC Droid Eris back in March (2010) and have been running the stock version firware (1.5) since then.  This morning I received an alert in my notification bar that a system upgrade was available.  The long awaited 2.1 version was ready to be downloaded.  I noticed that my battery life was at 60% and figured that should be enough to get me through it.  I was also fairly close to a Verizon tower so I knew my phone wouldn’t be struggling to find a signal.  Time to start the process.

The download only took about twenty minutes and the install took about fifteen.

As soon as you click install the phone goes black, and then an icon and status bar appears.  Once the first phase of the install is complete, a new icon appears showing that the new upgrade is installing into the phone.  After the second part of the install is complete, the Eris reboots.  This reboot takes about three minutes to completely load.  I guess it’s testing out all of the installed apps to see what is up to date and what is not.

ICONS CHANGED, MISSING

The first thing I noticed after the phone finished rebooting is that all of my homepage screens had gone back to default.  This bummed me out a little, but it also gave me the opportunity to start all over.  I was very eager to jump in there and start adding things, but decided to take this opportunity to blog about my experiences.

PEOPLE (CONTACTS)

When I purchased my phone back in March, I had all my contacts from my LG Venus transferred to the Eris.  I didn’t think this was even possible so when the sales rep completed this for me I was thrilled.  While using 1.5 I synced my contacts with Gmail.  After the firmware upgrade all of my previous contacts were gone except ones I manually entered after purchasing my phone.

Attempting to sync contacts with Gmail

I had some trouble syncing my contacts with Gmail.  I will not fault HTC, Verizon or Google for this as this is the first time I’ve had this problem and it may be caused by the mass amount of people attempting to sync after the upgrade.

Once I chose to sync manually the phone began syncing with both Gmail and Facebook right away.  This process took about 15 minutes which was very surprising, but, again, I chalked this up to everyone receiving the upgrade.  If you have to sync manually follow these steps:

Settings > Accounts & sync > Sync now

You can click on a particular account (Facebook, Google, Twitter) to fine tune any settings.

Now it’s time to start updating my homescreens.

FACEBOOK

My next step was to add the Facebook icon back to my homescreen and start it up.  After about five seconds everything was updated and good to go.

TWIDROID

I use Twidroid to access my Twitter information.  Just like Facebook, I added the icon back to my homescreen and launched the app.  Again, after about five seconds everything was updated and good to go.

INTERNET

I launched the Internet app for the first time (since the upgrade) and it asked me, “www.google.com wants to know your location”  I chose ‘Share My Location’ and since I don’t have the GPS turned on it picked the cell tower closes to me.  Good enough.

Now it was time to see if my bookmarks were still in place.  WOW…. HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT… at first.  There’s a new option on how to view your bookmarks.  Before it was just thumbnails and list views.  Now there’s a grid option.  I found it very ugly and decided it had to go… AT ONCE.  To get back to my thumbnails, click Menu > Thumbnails

Okay, Internet is good to go (yeah, I say that a lot) so let’s dive back into the Android Market to see what’s new.

APPS & ANDROID MARKET

It was at this point I decided to check out Android Market to see what apps needed updating.  The list included:

Google Maps > 4.2.0
Advanced Task Killer (ATK) > 1.7.9
Facebook for Android > 1.2

After the installs were complete, the first app I went to was the Facebook app, since I’m on that several times a day.  After accepting the new install I opened the app.  I couldn’t find anything new.  It must be just new coding.

ATK – same thing.

Google Maps – I turned the GPS setting on and it found me very quickly.  It even displayed where I was in the house.  I turned off the app, and then the GPS settings, then restarted it.  Instead of the familiar blue dot showing my location, it was now an arrow which seemed to keep changing which direction it was pointing in.  I’m not sure what is going on, but I’m going to do some more research and write a more detailed review later.

TIME FOR A REBOOT

Okay, enough playing around.  Let’s do the first reboot since the upgrade.

The familiar three droids on skateboards appear, but no more driods popping up.  While this saves time, I’m going to miss the little guys.  After the three disappear, an HTC splash screen appears: “htc – quietly brilliant”  The Verizon Wirelss logo appears next.  The nice animation is gone and the logo sticks around for a few more seconds than before.

I will note that the startup time is much quicker with 2.1 than 1.5.  I’m very impressed with that.  In fact, the phone including apps all started very quickly.

Well, that’s going to do it for this blog entry.  As I dive into the phone more I will post additional updates.

Thanks for reading!

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Categories
Chat with Chimpie

Chimpie Interviews Josh Banks & Josh Loe of HostGator

Today I’m launching a new section of my website called ‘Chat with Chimpie’. My hopes are to ask the questions that I think many of us have but don’t know how to go about getting the answers to.

My first interview is with Josh Banks, Support Manager and Josh Loe, Customer Service Manager of HostGator.  The interview is in response to the routing incident at ThePlanet on Monday (May 3, 2010).  Thousands of websites were affected.  Some sites appeared to be inaccessible while some end users were able to view them just fine.  Within moments of the router going down, Twitter and other forms of social media lit up with people screaming about their servers failing.    There were lots of misinformation being spread around, so I wanted to give HostGator, one of the hosting companies affected by the outage, a chance to explain what happened.

Early Monday morning there was a routing issue between ThePlanet’s Houston and Dallas datacenters.  Can you explain what happened in a little more detail?

ThePlanet has determined that there was an issue with a faulty line card.  This line card was suspected to be the contributor to both outages at 2am and 8am.  This is really the only information at this time we have from ThePlanet.

Was this a software or hardware issue?

This issue was caused due to hardware failure.

In the beginning, it was Tweeted, “Currently all servers at ThePlanet are down.  This includes our chat and ticket servers.  We will keep you posted.”  Was this an accurate tweet?  Were the servers really ‘down’?

Yes and no.  I tweeted that because I was informed that all our servers were down because our office could not connect to them.  Certain ISPs around the world could still connect, however our office could not.  This was corrected in a few minutes on Twitter as we learned more about the situation. During the entire networking issue the servers never actually lost power.  When trying to stay on top and keep everyone updated on the situation sometimes things are posted prematurely.  I certainly learned a lesson from that.

Why were some websites working while some were not?

The majority of our shared servers are located in one of the five Dallas area datacenters.  Our dedicated servers are spread out from Houston to Dallas, TX.   The reason some websites were working and others were not was simply because of the routing issue.  Some ISPs were able to see the servers, and some were not.

As the routing issue was resolved, you tweeted, “Routes may still be reconverging.”  What does this mean?

Routing convergence is the time it takes for BGP (border gateway protocol) updates to filter throughout the world.  This can be compared to DNS propagation, however it is much quicker, usually 3-5 minutes unless something is still broken.

Why did HostGator’s phone, chat and ticket systems go down?

Our Phone, Chat and Ticket system are all hosted on servers at ThePlanet.   While we still were receiving phones, chats and tickets from people who were able to see the servers, our Houston headquarters was not able to reach the systems.  You would log into live chat and see 265 people in front of you with zero agents taking chats, when actually there was a full staff here at our office.

Why did HostGator’s website and forum stay up?

The website and forums stayed up for certain people, just as the phones, chat and ticket system stayed up.  It was all depending your ISP.

How beneficial has Twitter been to you over the past year?

Twitter is very beneficial to us here at HostGator.  It allows us to communicate with our customers in a more personal manner.  It also allows us to notice common issues quicker, because as we all know, if there is a wide spread issue with anything the Twitter community will be all over it.  The past month I have taken over the spot of Customer Service Manager here at HostGator and part of that responsibility was our Internet presence.  This consists of Twitter, Facebook and all forums that are related to hosting.

www.twitter.com/hostgator

What other forms of medium do you use to notify customers of large outages?

We currently use Facebook and our Forums.
www.facebook.com/hostgator
forums.hostgator.com

What should your customers have taken away from this?

What our customers should have taken from this is that we are dedicated to keeping them updated in situations like this.  One of the biggest things that we stress is that we are a very honest company.  We have never tried to hide any sort of outage, compromised servers or deceive anyone when it comes to our network and services.  One of the biggest things that I can suggest to all customers is, join Twitter and follow us.  It is an amazing network of people and even if there is an outage here, we will be able to keep status updates.

Chimpie’s final thoughts

While we as customers hate to see our sites inaccessible, I know the folks at HostGator really had a lot on their plate when the line card failed.  Knowing that your customers are affected and knowing that there is little you can do must be frustrating.  And knowing that your customers want to talk to you, and you want to talk to them, but you can’t, must be even worse.

When outages occur, we as customers have to be patient.  Most issues can be resolved very quickly.  Some cannot.  We are at the mercy of our hosts.  There are some things we can do to help work around these issues, and I’ll cover that in another post.

I would like to to take a moment and thank Josh & Josh for taking the time to answer some questions about this outage.  I know I learned a little more about hosting and I hope you all did as well.

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Categories
General

A new feature is coming soon

I know I haven’t updated you all with anything recently, but a new feature to the website will be coming very soon.

If you haven’t already, be sure to follow me on Twitter and Facebook. I always try to update those whenever I create a new blog entry.
www.twitter.com/chimpie76
www.facebook.com/chimpie

Thanks!

Chimpie