24 Hour Support Paper







Background

This paper is a discussion on various 24 hour response options used by small and medium sized companies, mainly within the UK. It discusses some of the options available to provide 24 hour cover, the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

This paper discusses 24 hour operational support of Internet network infrastructure, however, the approaches here may also be relevant to other applications and industry sectors, for example 24 hour security response, medical on-call, maintenance, automated alerting systems (For example refrigerated storage alarms.) Or indeed any situation where a 24 hour "on-call" response is appropriate.



Qualities of a good on-call contact:

  • Patience
  • More Patience
  • A good telephone manner (Always a pleasure talking to, even at 4AM!)
  • Excellent problem solver
  • Initiative (Able to work without a high degree of supervision)
  • Methodical
  • Good written communication
  • Willing to learn and adapt skills from experience
  • Knows personal limitations (Know when to call for backup, know limits of knowledge, never tries to bluff it.)
At some time, you have probably have dealt with a person who seems utterly hopeless at doing on call. These are the people that always come across as impatient, inflexible, rude on the phone - just trying to get rid of the call, saying they'll call you back and then don't take your number, or fail to call back etc. It's always unclear what they are going to do next, then when you won't go away, they spin you some half-baked story, then they have to call for backup, then you will have to explain your problem yet again to somebody else. Magically your problem goes away, and they finally send you an e-mail which is full of spelling mistakes and all a bit vague as to what the problem actually was, and are unable to elaborate. What's more, because they probably passed most of the problem to somebody else at an early stage, they haven't learned anything for next time.

On-call is about the desire to deliver a high quality service, and to resolve problems quickly as possible and definitely not about money

Good on-call staff are nearly always motivated by the desire to provide a good service, enjoy helping others, are good problems solvers, money is not usually the primary motivating factor (Although it may help!) Good on-call people have a natural troubleshooting ability, and gain a sense of achievement resolving problems, and are continually learning through experience. Not everybody is suitable for on-call roles, and you should try to recruit people with the right qualities, and avoid forcing unwilling people to go on-call. (Of course, this is easier said than done!)

Reasons why people are unwilling to be on-call:
  • Family reasons (New baby and on-call definitely not a good match!)
  • Live too far away from the site to attend out of hours.
  • Lack of confidence/knowledge.
  • Not being paid for on-call.
  • "I seem to be the only one that ever does on-call..."
  • Unsympathetic management. ("I've been awake all night and you still insist I show up at the office at 9AM")
  • Unsympathetic colleagues. ("Can't your problem with margins in Word wait until the morning? Did you read the help?")

Approaches to 24 Hour Response



1. Do not provide 24 Hour support!

All services are offered on the understanding that there is no out of hours support available. Some small companies may choose to adopt this approach, or respond out of hours to e-mail only, and on a best efforts, "if I happen to be checking my e-mail at home" basis.

This approach is valid in some situations, depending on the target market or criticality of the situation.
For example, a company may be able to sell cheaper services because it does not incur the overheads associated with offering 24 hour support.

A prompt response to a customer's e-mail out of hours may exceed their expectations, and they will go away with a good impression, but there may come a time when a more urgent request is not seen until the following day, and customers may begin to take the out of hours response for granted, (Possibly blurring the service offering somewhat, and disappointing the customer.)

If this approach is adopted, it may be backed up with an automated fault detection system, and/or a method for some customers to contact somebody out of hours. 24 hour support might even be sold as an added extra to offer a "premium" service to some customers, in this way the smaller business might be able to retain customers who require 24 hour support.

Smaller businesses may be able to add value to the 24 hour service offering, for example by keeping spare equipment available for quick replacement. (Larger companies may be able to answer the phone out of hours for initial contact, and have front-line call centre staff available, but they may not be able to understand the problem and react as quickly as a smaller company.)

It is an advantage to be consistent in order to manage customer expectations. (Especially if you have lots of customers!) This may be as simple as defining the nature of enquiries that may be actioned out of hours, or placing a ticket system/auto responder on the e-mail to reply to the customer stating the support hours, and that a reply out of hours is not guaranteed, or that "We aim to respond to your request within 24 hours...."

Not replying to e-mail out of hours if you do not "officially" offer out of hours service may also be a simple tactic to ensure that customers receive a consistent service. (After all, if they are not paying for 24 hour service, why should you provide it?)

If you do not provide telephone support (but only e-mail) always state this clearly on your web site. Some customers may be put off by the absence of a telephone support number. (Others may be attracted by cheaper services offered without telephone support.)



2. The "on-call phone" and the "service status line"

A phone number is diverted, or a mobile phone is used to provide a contact point out of hours. This approach is often suitable in a situation where calls are infrequent, or calls are only from other staff in an organisation. It works well up to a point, being able to quickly get hold of somebody out of hours.

A common down side to this approach is that the on-call phone can get "stuck" with one person, and not passed around a team, creating a huge dependency on one person. (Usually the most experienced member(s) of the team will be lumbered with the on-call phone.)

If on-call phone duty is shared by a team (perhaps on a rota basis), there must be clear procedures established and documented (ha ha ha!) on how to handle particular types of call so that all team members are able to deal with the out of hours calls effectively. (All too often, I have seen the situation where one person ends up getting called by colleagues 90% of the time even when they are not on call, simply because their colleagues are not skilled enough in some areas, or do not know how to handle a particular call out of hours, and so it gets "escalated".)

This is a frustrating situation for all concerned. The caller will need to speak to multiple people before speaking to somebody who can help them, two people may be woken up in the night, and the person to whom the call is "escalated" may feel that they have little choice but to effectively remain "on call" permanently (and possibly even while their colleague who was "officially" on-call gets paid!) This problem of a "skills gap" in a team is a difficult one to address. Knowledge needs to be shared effectively in the team, and new members of the (on-call) team need to be "shadowed" by a more experienced person when going on-call until they are comfortable with being on-call by themselves. (On-call conference calls may be of benefit, so that the newcomer can listen in and learn how to handle calls from those more experienced.)

Skills and training needs should be reviewed regularly, the on-call team briefed on how to deal with new services/types of customer etc.
Sadly, all too often, this does not happen. Information has to be found out "the hard way" when a call is received, or via "back channels": "I know, Dave won't mind if I call him up now. He helped me in the past...."

One practical way of sharing knowledge throughout the team is to establish an "on-call journal" or "blog" where all on-call activities (Problems reported, steps taken to resolve problems etc.) are recorded. This will aid in post-incident reporting and hand-over of on-call duty in the team, and allows others to observe and learn about on-call.

The "merger jobsworth"

I have even seen situations where "Company A" has acquired "Company B" (and its customers) And the staff in the on-call team (Who formerly worked for "Company B" do not know how to deal with "Company A" customers and vice-versa. What's worse, is this can persist for years. Customers call the out of hours number only to be told that "as they were a customer of Company B, and I work for Company A, I'm not familiar with that service, so I can't really help you. Sorry."

The "status line"

Some thought needs to go into what happens when many calls at once are received out of hours (network outages, major problems etc.) The person taking the calls and dealing with the problem are usually one and the same. It can be a highly stressful situation if many people are repeatedly calling every half hour or so for an update, when the on-call person is trying to actually deal with the problem (or multiple problems!)

Some companies have added a recorded message facility for these situations, so that the status update can be automated: "The network is down, we know, we are dealing with it..." (now please go away!). Experience has shown that such "status lines" can be a hassle to update and get forgotten about as the situation changes. Possibly worse than customers not knowing the status, is being told the what the status was a week ago, or that everything is fine, when it clearly isn't! (Personally, I find recording a decent voicemail greeting hassle enough, requiring several attempts to get it right, let alone recording a detailed status message, in a stressful setting, that sums up the situation correctly and is clear and understandable by callers!)

As a result, the status line is often the last thing to get updated, many callers do not trust them, preferring instead to get some "up to the minute" assurance that "their" problem is being dealt with. (It may be difficult to explain to some customers that the reason they cannot get their e-mail is because of a network outage – they might not be able to establish cause and effect, so the "status message" will be meaningless to them unless it is very well thought out. All this takes time!)

On the other hand, if there are large volumes of calls, the "status line" may be the only practical way to deal with the situation, but they are effective only if kept up to date. (Perhaps some more detailed status information could be posted on a web page, and callers directed to the web page.)



3. The 24 Hour Message Taker/Pager

Works well after hours, where on-call staff might be expected to be asleep. Callers call a paging bureaux or similar message taking service, and the message is relayed via SMS to a mobile phone, or to a pager. These services are cost effective for applications where calls are not high in volume, but a response is needed within about 30 minutes. (If placing some reliance on the message bureau to relay messages.)

Paging in the UK

Unlike other countries, paging is not as widely used in the mainstream consumer market the UK, and there are no paging networks that have native two way paging or interactive capabilities.

Pagers are still relied upon every day by services such as Police watch schemes (shops, pubs, schools), Bomb alerts, Lifeboats, Doctors on call, and a variety of messaging applications (Everything from stocks and shares update services, to Birdnet, a rare bird sighting service!)

With the advent of SMS on mobile networks, mainstream consumer interest in paging services has dwindled, since SMS provides a quick and easy, low cost, two way messaging capability and requires no separate device. By contrast, pagers were beginning to look outmoded, with a one way message system, relatively expensive, and requires a separate device and subscription. The future of paging in the UK seems uncertain, now limited to Vodafone Paging, PageOne, and BT paging.

Paging does, however, have a few advantages over SMS, (Which may help to explain why many existing paging users have decided not to migrate to SMS). It is important to note that at this stage, I do not wish to advocate one particular approach or technology over another: All have their good and bad points.

Advantages of Paging vs. SMS:

  • Rapid delivery – messages are typically delivered within 30-60 seconds of being received by paging company. SMS delivery times can vary depending on how busy the network is. Anybody that has tried to send a message during busy times (i.e., New Year's Eve, SMS voting for "Big Brother", "Pop Idol" etc.) will know that messages can get delayed – sometimes turning up several hours after they were sent. Having said that, if messages are sent into the pager network via SMS, they may be also subject to delays, but from experience, it is generally the queues between the mobile networks that become congested and not usually the SMS queue to the paging network.


  • Group paging – Pagers can receive messages for a group number, as well as an individual number. In this way, one message is transmitted and it is simultaneously received by all pagers in the group. With SMS, a separate message must be transmitted for each recipient. (Greater cost and not simultaneous – some people will always receive SMS message slightly before others, depending on the order the messages are transmitted.)
    Arguably, the greater cost of transmitting SMS to a group of people may be offset against not having to pay for paging service subscriptions, but this will obviously depend on the volume of messages sent. (i.e., If each pager costs £10 per month, and each message costs 10p to send to any number of recipients, then switching to SMS would mean that each message to each recipient will cost 10p. So, the cost of sending a message to a team of 6 people will go from 10p per message, to 60p per message, but with a saving of £60 per month on pager subscriptions.)

    With this in mind, many networks sell text bundles or packages to make SMS as cheap as 2p per message or text messages included in a (single) monthly subscription. Depending on the situation, group paging may not be used out of hours anyway – our monitoring system, for example, will send critical messages to the entire team during the day, but only the on-call engineer out of hours.


  • Consistency – A pager is a simple device that delivers a consistent and well understood response. All of a team will usually have the same type of pager. By contrast, there are a wide array of phones with huge variety of features and approaches for handling SMS messages. If the intention is to wake somebody up, a pager is pretty much guaranteed to do this, but many phones do not provide much of an audible alert, or an alert which is long enough in duration and/or requires acknowledgement. Many phones can be set to make a loud/continuous tone when a message is received. On the other hand, if a non-critical message is received (say, an unimportant message from a colleague or friend) if the handset is set to make a loud noise when a message is received, this would be inappropriate. In short – what happens when the message is received is entirely dependent on the model of handset and how it is configured. With the growing problem of unsolicited "SMS spam", I am sure that on-call staff would not appreciate being woken up at 4AM only to be told that they had won a prize in a fabulous prize draw. (Just call some premium rate number for 10 minutes!)


  • Audit trail – The paging company is (usually) able to see all messages recently sent to a pager, and are able to re-send them, or read them out. This is not possible via SMS.


  • Better coverage – Historically, pagers work in areas where mobile phones do not have signal. It will beep even if the signal is poor, but the message may be garbled. With SMS, the message will not be garbled but will be delayed until the phone has a good enough signal to register on the network, and has been present on the network for a few minutes before messages will be received.
  • Message taking service – If a call is placed to the out of hours contact number and the on-call person is asleep, their phone will ring and they will have to wake up and immediately deal with the call "from cold". This means that when clients call out of hours, they get an incoherent response from somebody who is half asleep and is not prepared to deal with their call.
    In my experience, it is much better to use a (non-automated) message taking bureau so that the recipient of the message can call back when they are ready. i.e., they may have to wake up, go to another room, switch on computer, log in, check the system, look up contact details etc. This not only presents a much more professional image to callers, but allows time for the on-call person to prepare a considered (if sometimes only initial) response. (This is particularly useful for the occasional disgruntled/angry caller!) The on-call person also has the option to just ignore the pager message. (If it was a frivolous request that can wait until the morning. I usually return all calls to avoid being paged again just when I got back to sleep.) Some mobile phone operators also offer a message taking service where messages are transcribed to SMS. In our environment, this response delay of a few minutes sometimes has a positive effect. Many ISPs will page us in a "knee-jerk" reaction before they have fully assessed the nature of the fault. (Or managed to get in contact with the right people.) I have received many pager messages, that, by the time I returned the call, the ISP has already solved or worked around the problem themselves. They will answer my call a great deal less stressed than their initial "panic!" reaction, will thank me for responding to them, maybe chat to me about the problem, and hopefully go away thinking that LINX is great. (Everybody is happy, and all for just delaying things a bit!) (As an aside, we use an 07000 number which is diverted to the current on-call pager. This divert does not cost us anything, because the 07000 provider recoups their cost from the caller. The same is true of calls to a UK land line. However, if we divert our 07000 number to a mobile provider, then the 07000 number carrier will send us an invoice for those calls, charged at their mobile tariff.)
  • A separate device. Whilst to some, having to carry around both a phone and a pager may be a disadvantage, there are definite advantages when delivering important messages:
    • Typically a pager requires one or two AAA batteries, which need replacement every few weeks. However, most phones require recharging every few days. (Depending on battery life and usage). My phone always seems to die at a really inconvenient moment!
    • The phone can be turned off, while leaving the pager on (and vice-versa). This allows the user a quick way to control when they wish to receive messages. For example, they may not wish to receive pager messages if they are not on call, while leaving their phone on, or they may not wish to be disturbed by phone, but receive only important messages via their pager.
    • Pager messages can be read while the recipient is talking on their phone. An SMS would usually require the user take the phone away from their ear and look at the messages received. (Unless of course they carry a headset – a separate device.)
    • Separation of messages – Allows simple separation of high priority (pager messages) from low priority (SMS). If all messages are received on one device, an important message could get lost in amongst a pile of low-priority messages, or a personal message overlooked if it was received in amongst a group of automated alerts, for example.


Advantages of SMS vs. Paging:


  • Two Way – One obvious advantage of SMS is that it is a two way service, and this allows possibilities such as being able to acknowledge automated messages via SMS, and responding to individual messages.
  • Delivery Reports – Many networks support delivery reports of messages – a way to check if a message has been received. A mobile network can send back a Delivery report message to the sender when the message has been received. (Whether this can be automated is yet to be investigated)
  • Single Device – Users will appreciate only having to carry one device. (Even if this does become a single point of failure.)
  • International – SMS now has a greater reach than most paging networks, in that messages can be sent to roaming GSM users in many other countries. (Which may or may not be of benefit in a particular 24 hour on-call situation.)
  • Message Queuing – Since a mobile network can tell if a handset is registered, messages are held in a queue for a set period when the phone is unavailable. When the handset registers with the network again, all queued messages are eventually sent to the phone. (SMS supports setting the message validity time on a per-message basis - typically 7 days or 24 hours by default – after which the sender will eventually receive a message back saying that their message could not be delivered. Most handsets allow the user to set this interval.)

    Paging networks lack this queue facility, and simply broadcast the same message at intervals. The paging network has no way of knowing if a message has been received by an individual pager. (In fact all pagers on the network in the same paging zone/frequency will see all messages, but the pager will check only the address part of each message and ignore messages not destined for it.)

    If the pager has already received the message within a set time period, it does not beep again. If it has not previously seen a message, it beeps. Typically, a more advanced paging network will retransmit the same message every few minutes for 10 or 15 minutes and then stop transmitting. Some Paging networks (Particularly busier/larger networks) will only transmit a message once or twice, and if the pager is not available or switched off, obviously the message will not be received.

    The classic problem we have in London is the Tube. When underground on the tube, neither the pager or the phone has any signal. When I emerge at the destination station, messages queued via SMS will be received on my phone, but it is possible that a pager message could be missed.
  • Compatibility – Although paging networks are reasonably well integrated with SMS, there are some issues. For example, it is only possible to send a message via SMS to a Vodafone Pager from a Vodafone phone. It is not possible to send messages to a Vodafone Pager from another mobile network via SMS. (The sending GSM modem must be on Vodafone). Gateways between the paging and mobile networks receive varying amounts of support when they go wrong.


4. The Night Shift - "Awake is the new sleep."

It may get to the point where the only way forward is to have dedicated personnel working 24 hours. While this is a little complicated to set up (Shift patterns, recruitment, office arrangements, various health & safety issues that need to be considered, etc.) It does solve a few problems.

Advantages to 24 Hour Working: (i.e. Network Operations Centre 'NOC'):

  • Processes can continue in the same way (or largely similar) as they do during the day. (For example, calls can be answered and dealt with, outage/emergencies can be co-ordinated.)
  • Night staff can carry out initial diagnosis and problem solving.
  • Callers from other countries (in different time zones) will receive a better service.
  • Night staff can perform other duties like responding to e-mails/trouble tickets.
  • Can address issues with lone working.


Disadvantages to 24 Hour Working:

  • Set-up expense. (May need to recruit extra staff to accommodate the shifts.)
  • Not all existing staff may be willing or able to work certain shifts (family or travel reasons etc.)
  • Establishment of clear procedures requires work. (Especially to start with.)
  • Can be more difficult to arrange cover for holidays/sick etc.
  • Communication with night workers can be more difficult (for example team meetings/staff meetings etc.)
  • Can be difficult to retain staff working only shifts. Employee training needs and career progression needs to be thought about.


Comprehensive advice on the specifics of 24 hour working is a separate paper in its own right, so I do not intend to go into too much detail about shift patterns and other practicalities here.

Many papers have been written that describe shift patterns and the problems faced by night shift workers:

http://www.bgu.ac.il/~bobbie/sites2002/evgeny/night.htm

Detailed information on the UK's Working Time Regulations are available at:

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/WorkingHoursAndTimeOff/index.htm

The Lone Working Problem

Many of the approaches discussed so far usually involve one person being "on-call", they can involve a lone working situation where the on-call person needs to attend site. From a health & safety point-of-view, this can be problematic in locations out of hours where the staff member attending site would not be discovered in a timely way in the event of an accident while working alone, and no other staff are immediately aware of their location. (In the case of co-location facilities, it is the responsibility of the employer and not the facility to provide adequate employee liability insurance at every site where employees work, and also to carry out a risk assessment for each site, which should include lone working.)

There are a few approaches that could be considered when establishing a 24 hour operation. The most common is to have two, more junior "front-line" employees working shifts, (Thereby getting round the lone working problem) who are able to perform initial diagnostics and problem solving, carry out routine tasks/maintenance, and escalate to more senior/experienced standby staff only where necessary. Another possibility is to have only one out of hours person on the premises that are regularly patrolled by a security guard, for example.

If neither of these approaches are suitable, then with technology available (such as VPNs, Voice-over-IP, ADSL lines etc.) It may be possible to create a "virtual NOC", with the out of hours staff working from home. Some thought needs to go into the arrangements of this, i.e. creating a suitable work area at home, and reliable connectivity/backup connectivity if this is required (i.e. In an outage, would the home connectivity also be affected?)

If calls were to be escalated and a site visit required, then somebody else should be informed that the site visit is taking place, or a second person should be called to accompany them to the site.

A variety of technology based solutions may be able to mitigate the lone working problem, for example an SMS based system of sending messages to the on-call worker's mobile, and requiring a response. If no response is received within a given time, then an alert is sent to somebody else. The difficulty with these systems is that they can be too obtrusive. Integrating them with other mechanisms for working out where staff are, may be a possibility. (Such as detecting where staff are logged in from, and idle time, or swipe card mechanisms.)

Establish clear procedures

It is vital to establish clear procedures for the front-line staff to follow so they can handle the most common situations, and what to do/who to contact in the event of various emergencies. A backup contact should be provided in the event that the first point of contact is not reachable out of hours for some reason. Procedures are required for any unusual situations and emergencies.

It may also need to be clarified what tasks the out of hours staff do not do, for example, it may not be appropriate for them to be progressing new installations (or continuing with support work that may not have been completed during the day) out of hours. If the out of hours staff are likely to have to deal with such work, then a reliable hand-over procedure is required so that they are aware of the state of any ongoing work that they are likely to be contacted about: "Sorry, Dave is not on shift at the moment, and I don't really know what's going on...." (And nobody handed it over to me) - might not be an acceptable response to a customer.

Lines of communication

Dedicated telephone lines are recommended so that the front-line staff can be contacted by other staff, and calls can be separated from any customer calls where this is appropriate.

Larger operations will need to have separate customer facing support staff away from the internal NOC staff, to avoid the NOC being flooded with customer support queries. It helps if all staff have access to the same trouble ticket/customer database, so that problems can be easily handed between support and the NOC.
(Where support is receiving a number of complaints from customers, they may need to contact the NOC to begin the process of troubleshooting, or for the NOC to contact support to make them aware that there is a problem currently being dealt with.)

Sadly, in many larger organisations, communication between the Support department (dealing with the flood of calls from customers) and the NOC (responsible for fixing the problem) is not good enough, leaving the Support department with no idea of the fault, what to say to customers, or an estimated time to fix. This is sometimes because there is a reluctance or difficulty in working out what statements should be issued to customers, especially where comments about faults could be taken out of context, or service level agreements are involved.

Mid-sized organisations, or those with only a few technical specialist staff, may opt for only 24 hour customer support staff, and no separate NOC, and when problems occur, support immediately escalate to the standby staff. One consideration of doing of this is that there needs to be a way for other staff and incoming calls to bypass, say, 30 minutes in the support queue. (LINX being the classic example where we try to contact a member regarding a problem, with no way to "bypass" the support queue and/or the call gets answered by somebody who is not sure what to do, doesn't understand the problem, or won't speak to us because we are not a customer.)

In small organisations, the NOC and Support staff may be one and the same, where call volumes (especially out of hours) are not expected to be routinely high volume.



5. Outsource the problem to somebody else! - "New Delhi is the new Cardiff..."

It is becoming increasingly popular for organisations to outsource their some or all of their 24 hour support and/or operations to another company.

Entire outsourcing is not usually be considered viable for smaller organisations (requirement too small to justify the difficulty and expense of completely outsourcing, and many outsource support companies probably would not be interested in taking on such a small client.)

However, a number of companies exist similar to an answering service, but offering more specialised "personal assistant" type services, to cater to smaller organisations. These can be used either as "front-line" answering and message taking services, and/or as an "overflow" call handling service when nobody within the organisation is available to answer calls.

Examples of personalized answering/PA services:

(Not all of these are 24 hour. NB: I am not personally recommending these services, they are just listed here as examples of such services.)

Many of these include add-on services such as on-line diary management, relaying messages via e-mail or SMS, 0800 numbers, and the ability to screen callers for specific details such as names/account numbers etc.

These type of services may also be of use in other countries when targeting customers in these countries, in order to have a "virtual presence" within a country. (At least until the business becomes large enough to justify having permanent staff in a particular country.)

Larger outsourcing companies are able to tailor the service to the specific needs of the client, providing end-user technical support, remote monitoring and management. These services are based on specific contractual requirements. Measurement and charging of calls might be based on call volume, tickets resolved, or a fixed rate. Obviously, some calls are more difficult to resolve than others, so call volumes might not be an appropriate measure of performance in each case. Careful consideration needs to go into the agreement with the outsourcing provider to measure the performance of:

  • Time taken to respond to calls
  • Average time taken to resolve each ticket (Not call duration as this is a fairly meaningless metric.)
  • Number of calls escalated from them
  • Number of calls where the problem was resolved first time
  • Number of callers that call back repeatedly
  • Number of staff at the outsourcing company dealing with the calls


Many outsourcing companies will be dealing with multiple clients, and so some form of agreement will need to be reached about the minimum number of staff they have available to handle your calls, (and are familiar with your processes.)

Outsourcing has some benefits in that it provides access to a call centre that can handle large volumes of callers, freeing up internal resources, but it is less suited to bespoke services where each client has a tailored service, rather than a "standard" service offering (e.g. ADSL, domain names, shared web hosting.)

Outsourced services always put a barrier between the organisation and its customers, so customer satisfaction surveys and careful monitoring of the quality of service are needed to ensure that the outsourcing is appropriate, and that the service is working well. Customers quickly feel alienated by impersonal services provided by outsourcing call-centres, especially after several calls, and holding for long periods of time, and/or having to explain the details of the same problem several times to different people.

As with in-sourced night staff, clear procedures need to be developed on how to deal with routine calls as well as various emergencies/unexpected situations. Dedicated communication lines may need to be installed (i.e., dedicated telephone lines, and connectivity in to your systems and network for access to customer databases and monitoring applications.)

Summary

Many of these approaches can be used in tandem to provide the right level of 24 hour support as suitable for any particular application.

This paper is as yet still a work in progress, and I would be very pleased to have your feedback, experiences and contributions. (Especially if you have a new approach that I've not covered here, or a new twist on an existing approach.)

Robert Lister
London Internet Exchange
<robl (at) linx.net>
tel: +44 (0) 20 7645 3510