By Grahame Davies
If there’s one thing a lot of us enjoy, for want a better word, it is analysing customer service and company communications. Today’s world has rightly lifted service levels in these areas to increasing highs and, whilst we at Simwood reckon we do a more than OK job in many aspects of this, we need to do more. We touched on this at SimCon2.
One of the limitations with statuspage.io, who we host this with, is that subscriber notifications cannot be adjusted depending on the severity of an incident. Thus we may want to push out a notice about part of the portal not working for some customers but we would end up sending SMS to many people intrusively. We have yet to find an alternative status page service that fits our needs and, short of writing our own which would seem disproportionate, we will continue to use statuspage.io.
So today we are announcing a policy on how we use our status page and for what sort of incident. The policy can be found within our support pages.
The policy draws attention to the word “outage” and how one man’s outage is another’s minor service interruption and here we endeavour to respond and provide information. In short, ultimately we will make a decision on what gets posted and some of our customers may disagree.
Associated with this, we may receive requests for “RFOs” from our customers and the policy covers how we will respond to those. Consumption of RFOs and the associated level of detail may vary and they take time to prepare. This can be viewed against a backdrop that an incident may require monitoring for 24 hours or more after the issue has been resolved and that identifying precise causes can be elusive.
We’re going to improve real time access to information about anything Simwood, including operational issues that haven’t found their way on to the Status Page, so we have opened up the Simwood Community Slack workspace. In this workspace you can expect to see Simwood staff, customers and guests joining in various conversations, a channel for status page updates and we’ll add more information from time to time. We’re hoping this can continue the valuable networking and interaction that we and our customers enjoyed at SimCon.
Subscribers to the channel will be moderated by us but why not request access now! Please fill in this form to request access and don’t forget to read the Terms and Conditions.
