On a SIMI lecture from Gabriel R. Bitran I learned that there are 4 characteristics where service differ from normal 'goods'. One of them is 'Simultaneity'. Services are simultaneously produced and consumed, you cannot put service 'on stock' to deploy when the market or conditions ask for it....
You might know that it's cold in the Netherlands. We experience the first winter since 11 years and this means that the temperature ate night is -10 degrees C. In these conditions many people suffer from problems with their car (e.g. a frozen lock or doors or a dead and broken battery). When this happens, the majority of these people call the ANWB/Wegenwacht to get help. The process is that a mechanic 'on the route' is dispatched to the unfortunate car-owner to get him/her back on the road... (in 2009 till now, 6th of Jan they helped 20.000 car-drivers...).
And here I would like to come back to the characteristic from 'Simultaneity'. Because of this unexpected cold winter week, the demand on the service organisation is HUGE but.... it is very difficult to set mechanics 'on stock' to be deployed these 2 weeks. You simply cannot clone mechanics to expand the team for these conditions..
As a result of this characteristic, there is a risk of a growing backlog (wait-time) and as a result less happy customers (waiting in cold cars...). The way the ANWB handles this situation is by making sure all resources are on the road early and making longer days. As a result, the number of people on the road and the number of cases per mechanic increase so the capacity is larger during this period.
In support we know similar situations. When introducing a new product version (e.g. eBus V12/Db v11) or on period- (year) end we see and increase of activity on the customer side. This often results in more calls to handle by support and development, with the same amount of engineers (no we do not keep the on stock ;-) ). There are a few ways we anticipate on this...
- By preparing, build experience and share this with the Oracle community so you can also avoid problems to happen.
- By making sure we have the customers with 'pain' on our radar. There is a team of people running a monitoring program where they, during the migration or go-live, keep a close watch on the customer to make sure we understand what is expected and fix what has priority.
- By keeping a close watch to the process and KPI's and adjust the process or resources when needed (you might have to wait a bit longer on a solution for non-urgent issues)
I can imagine that this service characteristic leaves some questions for you... what if it's me waiting in the cold car or who can help me when the upgrade fails ?? Some important lesson I learned is that you must make sure that you also anticipate on the situation (... change your battery in time, prepare upgrades) but equally important, make sure your service provider knows what you are doing so they can put your on their Radar screen, advice you on preventive measures and help you (with priority) when you run into unexpected problems...
Our lines are open...
Hans
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!!
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....
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 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
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