I once had Compaq tell me a new SCSI backplane for a server was 4 weeks! A new server 2 days.

So I bought the new server, swapped backplanes and sent the new server back telling AP not to pay.

Took a bit of yelling to resolve that one.

Now I prefer to have spares.

and don’t get me started with the tech that said that my swapping out a failed hard drive for a spare voided my contract.

DeepStoragenet

You get measured and possibly sacked by this. Pretty soon, your desire to really help solve the ticket so that it shouldn’t occur again is completely outweighed by your need to meet your productivity target set by your boss.

This is where you learn tricks that can keep the food on your table like thinking of an obscure question to ask the client to aid diagnosis …. when the outsourcer employs cheap 24/7 staff who know, over the wekend or throughout the evening, the client is not going to be there to answer their given phone number until next morning 9am or Monday morning which leaves the call ticking away on THEIR side of the stack whilst the analyst continues to try and fix the problem. That one works a treat everytime !

When, in conversation, you learn a key member of customer staff is on leave for a week, point the next step in fixing the call in their direction and, make the clock tick on the customer’s side yet again.

Ask for FULL experiences of the problem from ALL staff experiencing the problem (within reason – you can’t get too cheaky). Not just the key member reporting the issue with the “everyone tells me they are encountering the same issue” details.

The old classics …
Ask for screenshots….
I have had screen shots sent to me by people who obviously didn’t know how to make their system take an image of their screen….
I recieved what was obviously someone putting a 15″ CRT monitor onto a scanner and hitting the scan button and then sending me that as a screen shot….. I am not joking…
As it was obviously warped and the scanned image was faded and, more importantly it was a pain in the a$$ problem to fix, I rejected the scanned image as not suitable and asked them to contact their IT for a proper scanned image. ( Bought me 32 hours that one )

The outsourced company is full of it staff of varying levels of quaulity but we have managers that demand value for money…. Demand as in whiteboard at the end of the office showing weekly, who is going and who is staying if they do not up their game !

However, we had one client that negotiated SEV 1′s at 3 hours with a $20,000 per minute breach payment.. Our company signed the deal. Long story short, breached for 4 hours due to a secondary power supply not being plugged in. Primary failed.. Took 7 hours to get service back up and running… Client must have though Christmas had come early….. NP We will get it back

Before you sign with an outsourcer hoping to save yourself a bundle of cash, read the small print and read between the lines as to how they work. If you were an outsourcing manager, how would you run it if you had to run it for maximum profit ?

Z

Means some paperwork, but revenge is a dish best served cold.

I didn’t like selling much, but I don’t regret the time spent.

Customer service is, typically, a secondary consideration.

Oh, and the numbers that management use to analyse this situation always support this conclusion. I have never understood how this happens.

My biggest gripe is that issues are not passed up the technical chain quickly enough. I don’t denigrate the work of 1st line but their primary role should be to pass work to the correct people as quickly as possible. Instead it seems they have been given very basic diagnostic skills and told to carry out fixes themselves as much as possible. Doesn’t work in my experience.

100% agree!

I work as network engineer, I very rarely can read the contracts before they get signed but once it’s signed, me and my team have to respect it. There’s something wrong in that but none of the managers seems to notice it. So I work 12 hours/day and my salary never raises, while sales get prizes and benefits for te good job. I think I would better move to pre-sales asap.

We have a 4 hour repair SLA on our primary WAN circuits. Many outages are not solved in the 4 hours, so we end up getting the circuit for free. However the cost of the circuit is usually nothing compared to what we lose when we circuit goes down.

In that sense the penalty should be appropriate to the cost of the outage, but no provider is going to sign that.

Even if you could agree on all that, you still have to agree on how to measure it. I once had some monitored services where we had to notice the problem to claim the credit. What a joke.

The people negotiating the contracts are rarely the people that have to live with them.

Sean