Disappointment at trouble ticket response

Customer Support Server/Network Issues
1

Am I unreasonable in being disappointed in the slowness of support responses?

I have placed a total of 10 tickets since joining Jodohost in February. Below are a list of the tickets and the time it took to receive the first response.
[FONT=“Courier New”]
Trouble ticket hr:mn
DOT-67248-339 03:41
EHJ-27923-392 17:25
ADI-74251-979 05:59
CDK-65965-144 08:13
ORY-64359-254 02:19
EZR-17044-975 00:07
SUV-10526-709 02:09
JOR-63767-365 00:25
ASW-82704-253 03:48
EKY-67618-197 04:55[/FONT]

Note that the times are for first response, not resolution. Times of 3, 4, 5, 8 & 17 hours are, in my view, unacceptable for a reseller, and even 2 hours is stretching it. We have to respond to our customers, but it is very difficult when we are completely in the dark. Anyone care to comment?

The last ticket is still open. After I replied to their first response it has taken another 10 hours to get a reply (which happened as I was composing this message).

I even used live chat about 6 hours ago to check on progress. After I referred them to the ticket number, the response was it was being referred to a higher level and they would contact me soon. Since when has 6 hours been soon?

While I accept the difference in time zones may, at times, cause delay if 1st level support cannot resolve the issue, I cannot accept being kept waiting for 10 hours without any indication there may be some delay. And then they haven’t answer my questions.

So in desperation, I have come to the forum to seek the answers.

The problem:

Yesterday, I discovered mail sent from one of my customers was not being received – even if sent to other Jodo hosted mail accounts. This applied to both pop3/smtp mail and web mail. The mail client / browser indicated the mail was successfully sent. But it has yet to arrive. I created a test mailbox under the user’s account and got the same result. Mail appeared to be sent but it never arrived.

Overnight, Support replied to the ticket advising that the queue on mail five had been high, delaying mail, but it should now be ok. It wasn’t.

None of the test mail had been received (still hasn’t). The customer could successfully send mail (and have it received) via both pop3/smtp and web mail. However, using the test mail account I had created, I could successfully send by web mail, but pop3/smtp failed with this error:

Recipient error [451 Dynamic/Residential IP range listed by NJABL dynablock - http://njabl.org/dynablock.html]

A bit of testing revealed that the error only occurred if a pop3/smtp connection was made from my IP address block to any mail account hosted on mail5. Mail accounts hosted on mail4 were unaffected.

I asked if, as my tests indicate, it was my IP address being rejected, is mail5 testing authenticated users against the NJABL dynablock listing. If so, should it be? I thought the NJABL dynablock listed known dynamic and residential IP addresses, and being listed permanently is the eventual prospect of all such addresses. I thought it was useful only for checking smtp servers and of no use for testing user mail accounts. I possed the above questions on the ticket and asked if mail was still queued, as none of the test emails I send had been received yet.

10 hours later, I am advised that Jodohost mail servers had been “unblocked by njabl.org a while ago but we forgot to update you.”. Unfortunately they didn’t answer my queries and the problem still persists. The customer also has a dynamic IP address, and some (but not all) of the blocks allocated to his ISP are listed in NJABL dynablock. My concern is that sooner or later, he too will find his IP address listed. The same concern applies to most of my customers.

Can anyone confirm if my theory about the Recipient Error is correct, and is anyone else experiencing delays on mail being sent via mail5?

2

Murphy’s Law…

I have just received another reply:

Hi,

Mail5 check for blocked dynamic ips also.

It will be taken care within next few hours.

Regards
Neeraj

So I guess my theory is correct :smiley: and some of the questions answered.

There were 2 reasons why I chose JodoHost. One was the promise of 1 hour average response time to trouble tickets. The other was the active and open forums. I am impressed with the way customers and JodoHost staff use the forums. While the first reason has been disappointing (it’s still much better than my previous host), I would still give JodoHost and 8/10 grading - down from my 9/10 when I was evaluating potential hosts, but still ahead of the runner up :slight_smile:

3

I went through that ticket list and alot of the tickets you have been submitting are level3 nature issues. These issues do take much longer than level2 or level1 issues (such as file restores, database backups, etc).

As for your Mail5 email sending issue, the issue is definately being worked on and I’ll follow up on it.
It seems to have to do with the DynaBlock list rather than any server specific issue

4

I went through that ticket list and alot of the tickets you have been submitting are level3 nature issues.

surely you’re not saying that Jodohost ignores level 3 issues for 4 hours or more before even responding?

even if it takes a long time to resolve, no one likes being on hold without even knowing whether the person on the other end knows they’re there…

5

I understand. Right now what happens is that if a ticket cannot be answered by a support tech, he skips over it or assigns it to a level3 admin.
Problem right now is we dont have a level3 group setup in the ticket system, so there is no clear escalation. This is something I plan to deal with.

But Level3 issues yes take longer to respond because a level3 admin looks into it, its not answered by the level2 team.

6

I think the main thing they are trying to say is, we understand some issues aren’t easy and need level 3 to look at it just give us a note about it. That is the biggest issue I have, not knowing what is going on and just waiting. Just drop a note saying “We need to escalate this to our level 3 admins, they will update you shortly.” Then just have them update every so often (every 2 or 3 hours), I know they hate doing it and want to just work on the issue but any information for an update is better than sitting for hours with nothing.

You would hate to see what we have to do for our escalation/communication for my job. Lets just say we have to communicate to the customer every half hour and sometimes we even have to sit on a conf call the whole time while we work the issue.

7

Yash, I am not taking issue with the length of time it takes to resolve an issue. I think your team does well on that score. The issue is about keeping me and ultimately my customers informed. We are not in a position to know if a problem is level 1, 2, 3 or 4 in nature and to some degree it is irrelevant. We do know how it impacts on our business and our relationship with our customers.

If a problem is an inconvenience and has little or no impact on our business, then we won’t mind waiting an hour or two to be told that it will be attended to in the next day or so.

However if it seriuosly impacts on our business or our relationship with our customers, then we need to be kept informed of progress, or lack of it, at all times.

Having to wait 4, 8 or 17 hours to know if someone at support has even seen a ticket gives the impression that you are not really interested in our problem. You may have a team of experts working feverishly on it well past their normal shift. We do not know what you are doing unless you tell us. The lack of communication gives the impression that you are doing nothing about it, and you don’t really care about our problem.

I guess one way of putting it is that a fault, in itself, is not really a problem. It is the consequences of the fault that is the problem. I think this is something your support staff should keep in mind.

I think the trouble tickets need to have a section where we can indicate the seriousness of the problem to us (a set of radio buttons perhaps). Options could range from cosmetic/minor annoyance through to catastrophic/rage inducing. Varying response times could then be set for each level. For example 30 minutes for catastrophic through to 24 hours for minor problems. Remember I’m talking about response times here, not resolution times.

Between the response and resolution, we should be kept up to date with progress. The frequency would depend on the seriousness of the problem. For example, hourly for catastrphic through to weekly for the very minor issues.

I do think having a such a system would result in a higher level of satisfaction than the current “one size fits all” approach.

8

[QUOTE=Yash]
But Level3 issues yes take longer to respond because a level3 admin looks into it, its not answered by the level2 team.
[/QUOTE]

That, I think is a big mistake. All it needs is for the level 2 team to update the ticket with a note saying that it is being referred to level 3. Likewise, when level 3 admin assigns it to a support person/group, update the ticket. I checked the recent ticket every 10 - 15 minutes and never saw any other status than Unassigned. What reasonable assumption could I make other than no-one was doing anything about it?

9

nzkiwi, it says unassigned because with the way cerberus works now there is no place to assign it :slight_smile:

We are working on this to make it flow in a more uniform fashion.