IT Support Meltdown!

I couldn’t help but empathize with Bob Turley, CIO of our iPremier in our case study this week. Last year we hosted an employee survey for a client that led to a couple long, sleepless nights. The survey was hosted by a web hosting provider here in Atlanta who we’ve been doing business with for several years. By and large, our experience has been very positive, including good reliability, low costs, and solid local customer service and support. However, our experience was very different this time around.

During the first week of the administration, things seemed to go very smoothly. Data was coming in steadily and the phone was quiet (that’s a good sign!) On Saturday night I thought I’d check in to see how the survey was going and was greeted with a “fatal system error” message. My blood pressure spiked momentarily, but I didn’t panic because this sometimes occurs when the server goes down momentarily for updates, maintenance, or whatever. I waited a couple of hours, but still no activity. I called my programmer, who helped set up the site, to see what he could make of it. He suggested that we call the company to see what’s going on. To our surprise, no support was available locally so we ended up dealing with client support in the Philippines. They spoke broken English, and we had a hard time getting a clear connection. So we ended up having to repeat things over an over again. Sound familiar? After talking to a number of technicians our problem was finally escalated to the next level of service. You can guess what happened next.

Early Sunday morning I checked in and the system was still down. Tried to call the help desk again (can’t repeat what I said), and still got the run around that they were doing everything they could to fix the problem. Again, I felt we weren’t making any progress and getting the run around. I finally resigned myself that this problem could only be fixed locally and that the only hope we had was waiting until Monday morning to get a hold of the Atlanta staff (if they still existed). Early Monday morning the system was still down. I called the help desk and told them that we only wanted to speak to the local staff in Atlanta. After some delay, they connected us to their Atlanta staff. Yea!!! We tried to explain things once again, and the person we talked with said he would get on it right away, informing us that the problem may have been caused when the company migrated to their new server over the weekend. Of course this is the first time we had heard this explanation. Surprisingly, he called me back about an hour and half later and told me the problem was fixed and the site was back up. Found out that when they migrated to the new server, the new plan I had signed up for a few months earlier had not transferred over. The new server was still pointing to the old plan.

What frustrates me more than anything else is all the time and energy that was spent to resolve an issue that could have been fixed in a relatively short period of time had the right people been available to fix the problem. For two days, all we kept getting were broken promises and unwarranted delays. You feel completely out of control, but there is hardly a thing you can do about it without the right kind of support and service. We found out later that the company had merged with another firm and the management and support staff had all changed – obviously for the worst! As you can imagine, we’re evaluating other web hosting service providers for our next online survey. Hopefully our next experience will end up a little more positively and with a fewer number of gray hairs. Stay tuned!