Has it really been over two weeks since I last made a blog entry? Wow, time sure flies when you are busy. Between church events, work, on-call, and family, I seem to be short of time lately.
This week I am on call and I must say that it has been the busiest week I have had since I have been in this role. It has even been busier than the time I was on-call during month end report closing when my TL/colleague was on vacation. THAT says a lot.
Not only has each day been busy but each night has brought on special challenges and long hours. Monday I did not get to bed until midnight. I had a church meeting to go to so my TL covered for me for a couple of hours but I took over at 9 PM and did not get to a stopping point until midnight.
I did not get to bed until midnight on Tuesday as well. On Wednesday my wife had an outpatient procedure on her leg and I was away from the office for three hours but when I came back I was incredibly busy. I was so busy that I did not get to bed until 4:30 the next morning. I was able to sleep for three hours and was up again at 7:30 AM with an emergency call. I worked it until 8:30 AM and handed it over to my TL. I asked him if I could grab a couple hours sleep and he graciously obliged. The entire time I was asleep he was busy and when I came back online at noon, I was busy all day until 9:30 PM. I was able to go to bed early and got about seven hours sleep before I got up and started my day.
Today has been calm so far...only one new issue. While it has not been resolved yet, it should be. Mind you we still have two other open issues from previous days (including the mail issue from hell that is almost a week old and counting) but the total workload and stress level has been much lower.
My only complaint that I have today is that customers tend not to follow basic instructions very well. Example - we have a customer who somehow corrupted an Excel spreadsheet and needs one pulled from backup. The restore team pulls the file and puts it on a temporary share that the customer can access. The restore team e-mails the customer and informs them that the file has been restored and where to find the copy. The customer for whatever reason does not respond to the e-mail for several hours. I step in and e-mail the customer and tell them the issue has been resolved and the details can be found in an e-mail sent to them from the backup team. All I ask is that the customer test the solution and respond to the e-mail sent to them by the backup team, CC'ing me in the process.
What does the customer do? E-mail's me directly asking me if this is the newest copy of the file and if not, can I get them the newest one. They completely disregarded the e-mail and did not follow simple instructions. I politely responded back and told them again what I needed them to do. They are doing that now. I hope.
This week has also been plagued with vast amounts of mis (or poor) communication. We (my group) has to communicate and coordinate "high severity" issues across many teams and sometimes to other IT providers (even to our competition since our customer has outsourced their IT support to multiple companies) and it amazes me that I have been getting better cooperation from a certain competitor (whose three letter acronym I will not divulge 8^) ) than I get from my own company. I have been routinely told that "it is not my group's problem" when I assign a case or request a certain team to assist or troubleshoot. I am not trying to air dirty laundry here but it always seems to be harder to do business with your own company than it is with others.
It reminds me of the time I worked for GTE Mobilnet (a cellular provider under the umbrella of GTE Communications) and had a problem with my home service (aslo with GTE). I called up the local support (back before everything went to India) and told them my problem and just happened to mention I was a GTE employee. When asked which office I worked in, I told them the Morrisville, NC off and the woman said there wasn't any office in Morrisville office. I laughed and told her that there was and I indeed worked there and had been for over a year. She asked me where in Morrisville and I told her and after I mentioned I was with the cellular group, she became very cold and said, "Oh, one of those people who are trying to put her and her people out of work." Needless to say my home phone service took days to get fixed, all because some 19 year employee of a dying company and industry was offended that I worked for a more cutting edge goup within the same company.
I didn't get good serviced that day from someone in my own company and that type of thing happens today all the time. I can call up my contact at our competition and present an issue to him and he (as well as his colleagues) will work it and report back to me most of the time. Take a similar issue that my company is resposible for and call up my contact to hand it over to him (or one of his colleagues) and I will get poor customer service and people who will not follow established processes because they either don't care or are two busy to help. The only difference in today and back in my GTE days is that the person helping me is not in danger of losing his job to my group. It is I who is in danger of losing my job to them.
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