Supporting our Customers

Since some time we have problems with the printer at home. Good thing is that, if you know the trick, you can get it to work but my internal customers (the family) started to complain.  "The printer 'again' does not work - I need it for school - etc." I guess every IT'er will recognize this ....

Last Sunday morning I decided to fix it to restore 'the confidence in IT@Home'.  My first step was to go to the site from the printer vendor to search and download the latest drivers.   While fighting through the questions and 'term and conditions' I was able to download the latest version.  after 20 minutes download and 5 minutes installation it seems that I hitted an 'unrecoverable error'. My first reflex was download again and re-install.... 

One hour later I was in the position that  I did not have any printer installed and unrecoverable errors in the installation.

Time for Plan-B, ignore the site of the vendor and skip to 'ye old' Google.  Few queries later I found some 'soul mates' who experienced my problem as well and received hits and tips from 'experts' in the field to solve the issue.    20 minutes later, my printer was working better the ever ... tx to the community in the web-world !

When thinking of this time consuming process I remembered a recent discussion with one of my colleagues around the new Communities in My Oracle Support. He explained that the 'new generation' does not fully rely on the vendor site to solve their problems and answer their questions. Instead the new generation starts the search in the virtual community for particular problems.  This was one of the reasons Support started to put more focus on the communities IN My Oracle Support. 

He continued "We learned that questions are not always best answered through Service Requests and get better solutions through the community.  Key factor for the difference is the experience in the field.  Potentially thousands of people bring a lot of experience in and the 'I have seen this before' factor crucial to solve a part of the questions in the field."

I believe he is right and looking to my Sunday-morning experience it make sense.  The real reason for my printer problem was not related to the quality of the downloaded driver but because of a combination of setting in my PC.  A problem difficult to tackle by the printer supplier who will always take some assumptions around the configuration of the PC (not necessarily your configuration..). Solving the problem becomes but less difficult if you use the collective brain from millions of people connected to the web...

If you want to see this new community approach from support, take a look and lets me know what you think !

Reading through the support related weblogs I realized that most of them are targeted on promoting the 'technical' tools developed in Oracle Support or Development. This seems logical since the 'early-weblog-adopters' are technical people and attracted to these kind of innovations (1+1=..3).

I must say, the recently released tools are a great step forward for people who are taking care of large and/or mission critical systems but the focus on tools sometimes distracts the attention of our customers from a much wider set of services we van provide as support organization. Services that can help our customers to be successful because of Oracle solutions.

The idea for starting this weblog is based on this weak spot and I hope to fill this gap by informing you about the other side of support, the people and the way we provide our service.

There are two important milestone I would like to mention upfront and these are the two Customer Event that we are currently planning to organize in the Netherlands and Belgium (Feb-March2009) . This yearly event will cover a lot of different topics and is hosted by the 3 service organizations (Support, Consulting an Oracle University) keep you posted...

Hans Wiggerman
Director Customer Management Benelux

(p.s. this is a re-posted copy, the initial one posted 18th of Nov2008)

As mentioned before, the customer services team is on the end of the line of support so whenever processes fail or customers are not services well they end on my desk...   
In this case I received a call from on of our sales colleagues. He picked up  a complaint that 'his customer' was not services well and their service request was not solved....

First reflex is to go to MetaLink/My Oracle Support and review the details. It was clear that support did solve the problem and the SR was still open.  The reason was that this customer tried to order a shipment of Database version 8.1.7 .   Most of the readers will know that 8.1.7 has been de-supported for years so we simply run out of CD's of this version.

The support engineer provided this feedback to the customer but he insisted on the shipment of the software CD's.   In addition I tried to add some nice words to the Service Request (explaining that we cannot ship and support this version etc.. ) but this did not solve the dispute... even a mail to this customer did not resolve the situation so I decided to call and ask for clarification.

This call clarified a lot  ;-)  .   The technical guy was aware of the lifetime support policies and did migrate a long time ago (they even where preparing the 11i upgrades). When asked about the escalated SR he started to laugh ...  the reason for him to get this software was because a team member was almost celebrating his 10 year anniversary for the company and the 8.1 version was his first Oracle version in his career - he needed version 8 to make an award for this technical specialist....    With this is mind, we agreed that I would check the archives and get back to him on short notice.

So I dived into the archives (real deep), picked-out and send the requested CD with the required software.  Customer happy, I believe the colleague who will be awarded will have a good time celebrating his 10th anniversary and the SR was closed.
  

Hans

p.s.: we are out of CD's now - for the next anniversary think of another award ;-) 

You learn something new everyday. ..   yesterday I was in a customer visit  and we had a discussion about the architecture of the solution build for this customer. Along the way we chat about Cloud computing.  In fact I had the opportunity to learn the basics and benefits from this new IT buzz.  Although challenging, I will not go to the details in this blog  and leave this to the tech community.

The learning aspect is more relevant for this blog.  

My objective in every customer meetings is to tell about support, Share learnings,  how we work and how 'they' can make efficient use of 'the machine'. In fact, my approach is to take a case/sr that did not meet the expectations, do an internal (AAR) review and explain the learning to the customer. This can avoid falling in the same trap and is an opportunity to  improve the process...   as a free-gift back they tell me about the cloud computing ;-) 1+1=..3

I understand that it's difficult to do for all customers so we have regular (free) training sessions in support.  The agenda for this sessions can be found on our Oracle Support website.  

If you want a more personal approach we should have a chat. Looking forward to your comments but realize I am looking for learning as well ;-)

Hans

Today I was listening to an interesting quote from research done by  Pew/Internet . It seems that 50% of the people who purchased a new electronic device (TV, Cell phone, DVD recorder, internet connection ...) needs help to use it properly.  38% of these people approach user-support from the supplier to get assistance....

As employee from a service organization this comes as no surprise.  Many of the problems we face in support are related to configuration and setup problems.  The software stacks are getting bigger, wider and more complex.

And to be honest, it is not simple to manage software of this complexity.  Proper use requires a lot of different competencies. For this reason we chopped our software stack on smaller pieces. In support we have people specialized in these separate blocks. With this segmentation, people can understand and manage (even in multiple versions) their part well and are capable to help you.

On the engineering side we also try to support you.  As I told you, in our support-system we see many requests related to the software setup and configuration. We believe that these type of problems should be reduced.  Therefore support has worked the last years to develop the 'Configuration Support Manager'  (aka My Configurations and Projects).  This tools has now been evolved into the 'collector' and 'System Health' and is a standard part of MetaLink (2 and 3).

By installing a simple agent and uploading your configuration-parameters and log files to a secure environment in support, we are able to provide you with valuable health checking info.  If you are interested, take a look and hopefully we can reduce the amount of 'obvious' configuration and setup errors in your environment. 
More information about this development ... as usual ... on the web.

Looking forward to your experience...
Hans

Every year, second week in December around Saturday, the family 'takes-off' to get a Christmas tree. In the past we tend to drive around to find 'the right one' but since 2 years we end in the same 'shop'. 

And it is interesting to see that this decision is not taken based on price but is related to the service provided during the 'sales process' ;-). This is exactly the reason for writing this in this service-blog. 
Service is still a differentiator and a reason for Oracle to invest in improving and innovating it.

Back to my tree, the place where we bought the tree (in the past) was more an open field with a huge pile of trees.  This makes it difficult to choose and when you select the right one, you have to carry it yourself to the car and try to get it in (unpacked).  The result - you come home with a car full of dirt and a damaged tree (broken branches). But .... they where cheap!

Last 2 years we go to a place with a friendly guy, showing some trees to help you to make a good choice. When selected, they pack it carefully  while you do some more Christmas shopping. When finished you drive by and they help you carry the tree to your care and carefully put it in the back. And the good thing is ... they are not more expensive.....

The business model is obvious ... return sales (we go back every year)  cross selling (remember 'they pack it while you do some shopping' and it was very busy in the shop !) reference ability (if need for tree, visit Intratuin Barneveld ;-) ) and more important happy customers (they need them the other 50 weeks of the year).

As a conclusion;
dear customer, "Next time when you do your next purchase, take the added value of service into account !"

dear service provider, "Next time when you provide service, take into account that YOU can make the difference to your customer and have huge impact on sales  ! "

Today I spend a day on the support floor in our office in de Meern. After lunch  a colleague stepped up to me and asked, "you know something about web 2.0, can you give me a brief update on some highlights ? I might use this for my next project.."

Directly another engineer came in and provided the 'golden-answer', "web 2.0 is about Ajax"  APEX and other new Oracle tools are all build by, using, or developing in Ajax...  She continued in some further technical details.
  
This reaction is typical for people working in support. Purely focused on technical details not necessary 'interested' in what people do with the software.   I know that this is trained 'behavior'.    If support engineers should be thinking of all good things you can build with our technology, it should distract them to focus on the details. As a result we would spend much more time in solving the technical problems.

This short lesson could help you when you approach support with a question. We dive deep into the technical details to solve problems.  Do not ask the techical support crew how to run your business or build software. This is simply not their piece of cake.  If you need this kind of assistance we can help you through our the communities in My Oracle Support/Metalink, Oracle University the  Oracle Consulting organisation or one of our business partners.  They are specialized in that area (and are less skilled in the solvig bit).

How it ended - I gave my 5 minutes elevator pitch around Web 2.0 and now we have 2 new happy members of the web 2.0 community...
I wonder what their technical brains will do with this info and what will come out of that... web 3.0 ?


PS .. if you Google 'web 2.0' it says:  "Web 2.0 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on Ajax, [2] [ 1] OpenLaszlo, Flex or similar rich media. [8] [2] ..."  

The exact answer from this engineer - looks like they have a build-in google search capability ... scary....

One of my team members had an interesting discussion with one of his customers.  His customer-contact "I know someone who uses an Oracle product that can run checks on their environment, preventing serious issues.  What is it, what does it costs and how can I implement it ?"

These types of questions never fall from the sky.  Most of them are a result of a recent problems and activities to prevent these in the future.  This is what we call the 'compelling event' for change...

Software is getting more complex and keeping a good overview (not even focusing on improvements) is a difficult task these days with a decreasing IT budget.  
IT suppliers like Oracle try to keep up with this demand for help and for this reason we have released the Software Configuration Manager.  This program consist of 2 parts, one agent collecting data on your host and a monitor encapsulated in My Oracle Support or MetaLink. The best part ..... its for free ;-)

Getting back to our earlier discussion, it seems that my colleague already addressed this tool to this particular customer in the past. For some reason it was never implemented/used    (busy, no focus-priority, no... compelling event?). Guess they now have a good reason to reconsider this and take a few hours to download test and go into production with it.

it will save them a lot of time and prevent them for future damage .......


p.s. : Every blogger is providing you his or her 2009 prediction - I will not step into this trap but do want to wish you all a fantastic 2009!!