2010 Survey Says Details 3 of 3…
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Hello Everyone… |
2010 Survey Says Details 3 of 3… |
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A month or so ago, we sent out a survey asking various questions. We did this at our busiest time of the year which is why it took awhile to get to the results. We had 70 replies to the survey. My first newsletter on the results showed the quantifiable results. This newsletter will address specific comments from the last of the 3 open-ended questions. There are some great ideas, some kudos, and some dirty laundry. Should be fun! |
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The most common complaint deals with staffing (i.e. Less hold time and weekend availability). I have addressed that separately at the end of this letter instead of with each individual comment. Question 14 - Please advise of any improvements you feel can be made to our operations and/or support department. · YOU'RE THE BEST!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Awesome! · Available on weekends. See Staffing at bottom of this letter. · When updates are installed, it would helpful to know what new features are available and how to use them properly. Something we struggle with. There are so many updates and many only apply to one customer or business segment. We have and are attempting again to send out release notes. · Communication between support techs so they each know what the other does. The techs sit in a bull pen. They sit in low walled cubicles so that they can hear what’s going on around them. They have a daily ‘Stand-Up Meeting’ to discuss what’s going on. There are systems for logging each call so that everyone knows the history of each customer’s account. We are working on a tiered level of support system. Communication can always be improved… we are working on it. · Would like to see more support techs on duty over the weekend days. Most of all courses are busier over the weekends and that is when problems usually arise. See Staffing at end of this letter. · Available on weekends. See Staffing at end of this letter. Have someone who is "on call". We have someone ‘On Call’ 24/7. Call the help desk and the recording will prompt you to press 1, follow the instructions and a support technician will be paged. This should be for emergencies only. If it can wait till the next business day just leave a message. · Monthly phone calls on "How can I help". Would love to but that would be over 1,000 phone calls per month. I would need to hire several more techs to do just this. Feel free to call us anytime. If you are having minor issues, compile a list and email them to us, I’ll get you the answers you need. See the conversation on Staffing at end of this letter. · Consistency in answers and solutions given from tech support staff. Better trained tech support staff. Support staff rarely, if ever, follows up with solutions to problems that I call for that aren't fixed immediately. We have a plan together to tier our support group. It takes 3 months to get a tech up to speed for level 1 support. It can take years to be an expert. Certainly your experience may vary based on the experience of the tech. We understand this issue and are trying different ways to approach it. · Support wait times are excessive - most times I call I have to leave a message and the call back is not prompt. See Staffing section at end of this letter. · I have been a happy and satisfied customer for many years. Cost of support is a little steep though although the response has always been very good. Thanks! See Staffing section at bottom of this letter. · Hold time when calling for support is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too long...seems like you have to wait forever to get someone on the line. See Staffing section at end of this letter. · Primarily confer with Cory via email, which works great. When calling for support, wait time averaged 5-10 minutes. Email is a great way to go when you don’t need to actually talk to someone. It is my preferred way to communicate with anyone since it provides an automatic paper trail vs. trying to recall what each party stated in a phone conversation. · Support personnel need to be understanding that not all of us are stupid, that we have better things to do than to call support when everything is working. Sometimes get the feeling that they don't believe us when we call that there is an issue and an error is on the screen. Even when we can't replicate the problem, it doesn't mean it didn't happen! You nailed it. The trait comes from above here. If a support tech brings something to me and says ‘it doesn’t work’ without being able to show me what doesn’t work… I throw them out of my office. Fact of the matter is that if we cannot recreate it, we almost can never fix it. It is the job of the techs to recreate the issue, not just record that something doesn’t work. And that can be a painstaking task at times. It is not that we don’t believe it happens but there is just not much we can do about it until we recreate it. Btw – I’m going through the same thing. I purchased a new laptop from Dell about 6 months ago. I randomly get a blue screen crash. Cannot recreate it but it happens a two to three times per week. Dell replaced the memory, motherboard, and hard drive (twice). I went through all last week without a problem and thought we finally fixed it. It crashed yesterday morning on me! 2. The "press one to leave a message" on support doesn't work. The “press 1 to leave a message” does work but the caller cannot press 1 until they are prompted to do so. They will hear 2 other recordings during the hold time before the recording that gives them the option to “press 1 to leave a message”. 3. Send out release notes on what items have been fixed or how to use new features, that way we would not need to be surprised when reports have new formatting etc. Might ease up on support calls and operational questions. We have tried this a few times. Not sure why we struggle with it other than the lists that are generated are huge and would make no sense to 99% of the people that read it (including me!). We are taking another run at it. 4. Make suggestions as to how other operations use the software to improve their businesses and share them. Good idea. Maybe a Blog or Bulletin Board on our website? 5. Like I said, most of what you do is GREAT. Awesome! My particular staff listens to me talk to support and they question why some of the issues come up at all. It helps to have a history in the business. Any time you can check in a golfer and it takes about 4 seconds if they are in the system, that is awesome! Customers love the quick service! Great to hear, our new StarterHut v3.0 coming out soon will make it even quicker. · More thorough testing of software releases before they are given to customers. See our Hate Mail letter. Release notes when given and update are definitely desired. See issue above. · Monthly webinars so we may utilize more features of the system such as e-mail capabilities; loyalty rewards; packages; tier pricing; entering groups in on the tee sheet so that they come over to POS correctly and take the staff out of the loop as far as what to charge. See our customer portal for white papers and videos on many of these items. Also the Lessons From The Pro section of our website has about 100 How-To lessons. · The support is fantastic when we can speak to someone. It is difficult at times to have to wait for a call back. That is the only issue we have had. Thanks. See staffing at the end of this letter. · Faster response to bugs with PSK software. See Hate Mail letter and Staffing at the end of this letter. · Make sure the people who do answer in tech support we can understand on the phone. A friend of mine was watching golf at the bar with me one day and starts complaining about why you have to choose English now when using an ATM machine. He was bitching away about everyone here speaks English so why should we have to select English on the ATM terminal. Now this friend knows I have been around the world about 30 times. So after letting him vent… I simply said… You know I have found myself in places where nobody speaks English for miles and I didn’t see another American or Westerner for weeks. I can tell you as I have experienced firsthand how grateful you are that it asks you if you want English language (and that I have seen many ATMs that do not ask). Get a couple stamps in your passport and you will understand. His reply “I never thought of that! You are absolutely right!” He bought the next round. Let’s see, we are an international company with product installations in 13 countries and translated into 9 languages. We need the diversity here to handle everyone. If you have trouble understanding who you are talking too, politely ask for someone else. They won’t be offended and you shouldn’t either. By the way, if you need to speak in Thai, Japanese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Vietnamese or Dutch that will require a bit of scheduling if you’re calling our office in the States. Also – oddly enough – emails written in English can be handled by anyone in any of our offices and will be answered in English – even when the person doesn’t (or wont) speak English. So that is an option as well. · I am currently working on optimizing and exploring the potential of CPS here at [name edited] hotel. It has been neglected since install from this side via lack of knowledge and from CPS side via "who knows". I have since made contact with Sergio Paya in · Doing fine so far. Glad to hear! · Your support is pretty good. Thanks! · A system that works. A system you do need to call in each day to have things fixed. When you log techs into to update your system, it would help if everything worked after not lose quick sale buttons. The Quick Sale button was a recurring bug that has been fixed. Just a general observation here that may or may not be related since I don’t have the specifics of this case. Many folks want to do something a certain way because ‘that is how our old system did it’. While we try very hard to get things to work the way you want – you may find you’re better off by asking us if there is a different or better way to do what you are trying to do the old way. · Just clean up problems quicker, we have issues from November not being fixed that cause us to operate poorly for our customers, why could we call on old version issues and get fixed immediately, now we don't get answer and sometimes no return calls.... we all miss the old version. The ‘old’ system was for the most part written by me and my other in-house programmer. We were able to divide and conquer. It was based on a much simpler (yet much more limited) programming language. The fact that we were (and still do) support as many installs as we did on the old version was an industry rarity. With the latest ‘.net’ technology, we have a team of 15 full‑time programmers. All of their work has to be merged and tested daily. Conflicts have to be resolved when more than one person is working on the same portion of code. It is off the scale complex, yet we are still one of the few in the industry that can crank out new features and fixes as quickly as we do. · Your tech support is great minus the hold time. My system for some reason keeps coming disconnected from the data base. This I don't really understand, I should be able to use your system with a wireless PC. Thanks – see staffing discussion separately. Disconnecting from the database can be a number of problems. Most common is that you have the energy saving set on the PC. If the PC is set to turn off the hard-drive after a couple minutes of inactivity, turn off the network card after inactivity, etc.,this causes havoc with connections to servers. Beyond that, it can be a bad network card, a bad LAN cable, a bad router or wireless access point, etc. You can use the system with a wireless PC, but there may be limitations. The wireless signal needs to be strong, reliable and consistent. The IP address of the server needs to be static if you are connecting over the Internet. If you are processing credit cards, you need to take into account security requirements for your wireless access point to be PA-DSS Compliant. · Better testing of the present software. · Have been working with support for over a month and not had any luck in having the problem resolved. May need to know the specifics here. We also asked about a Loyalty Program in October 2009, and have yet to receive one call regarding this matter. Obviously, if you had not had a call returned since October of last year this has fallen through the cracks. Please feel free to call us back to discuss. In the meantime see the whitepaper in our customer portal or the lesson in the Lessons from the Pro series. Both have step-by-step instructions for creating a good loyalty program. · You support department has been very responsive so far. Thank You. Thank You! · Seen a lot of growth in company since we signed on keep up good work!!! Awesome! Staffing: This was brought up in many comments. Mostly in the form of “Call Wait times too long” and “Weekend Support”. This is a simple numbers game. We currently have 12 full time techs on first line support (they answer the phones) from 8am till 7pm Eastern Time. In addition, we have a tech support team in the Like many of you, I probably don’t make nearly as much money as everyone thinks I do. Our Tech Support group comes very close to a break even effort for the company. In fact, with our new monthly service fee that includes tech support and training, it is a losing proposition – at least in the short term. So – in order to provide staffed (vs pager) weekend support and larger staff during the week (for shorter call wait times) would require hiring several more techs. This would directly result in an increase of support fees to our customer base. There were a couple comments that support fees were high – but only a couple. In fact I think it was only one. Let me turn this around. Would you be willing to pay higher support fees (or monthly service fees) if I were to hire more techs and set up weekend staffing? Let’s assume a ‘tech’ cost $50K per year with salary, benefits, equipment, etc., and that on weekends they are going to be paid a higher rate. Plus added management and on and on. Let’s say we need to add 5 techs (and that I can find the office space which I am out of at the moment to put them). That puts us upwards of $250,000 per year. Divide that by the active support contracts (approx 800) and that comes out to a little over $300 increase per year in tech support for every customer along with higher per-incident calls for those not on active support contracts. Given the option of having to wait for a tech who will give you the same consideration as those who called before you to work as long as needed with you vs. a shorter wait time and weekend live support… would you be willing to shell out an additional $300 to $350 per year? I can assure you that I cannot absorb $250K per year out of pocket. I don’t make near that much. Let me know your thoughts. By the way – as summer approaches, our install season winds down and there are fewer trainers in the field – which means more are here sitting at their desks answering phones. So you should notice some improvement in the wait times but it will always vary based on the problem the guys in front of you have because the techs will try to resolve the issue on the phone or at least take the time to fully understand and document the issue so that it can be escalated to programming to be resolved. Thank you to all that participated in the survey. This helps us focus on the things that are important to you. We will do another one later this year or again early next. If there are questions you would like to see on a survey we do, please forward them. It does not necessarily need to be about our product. If the length does not get excessive, I will be happy to include them so you can pool your fellow CPS family. | |
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Until Next Time… Enjoy J If you need anything, let us know. Also, if you would like something specific covered in one of these Lessons, send the request my way. See all the great tips in our prior newsletters posted on our website under the Lessons from the Pro link. Thanks
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