[AusNOG] after hours staff requirement

Mon Sep 17 18:10:49 EST 2018

This. Humans are always better confirming escalation requirements.

I worked on-call for $work before we had 24/7 staff in ops.

The best of both worlds solution for this problem for us was a scripted
IVR.

“Thanks for calling $work. You’ve called outside of business hours. Hold
the line to leave a message and an engineer will attend to this first thing
in the morning. If your issue is critical, press 9 to be transferred to an
on-call engineer. “

*press 9*

“if you’re issue is found to be of a non-critical nature or outside of your
contractual terms an escalation fee of $99 will be charged at the
discretion of the engineer. Press 9 to accept these charges and be
transferred through or hold the line to leave a message “

I think about 5 calls in a 2 year period ever got charged back to the
customer as outside escalation criteria, everyone else logged a ticket for
the morning or had an issue that warranted on-call escalation.

“Is my issue that critical that I want to pay 100 dollars to have it looked
at right away?”  That’s a very powerful motivator. If yes, then we were
happy to look at the issue, charge the customer and on-call engineer bill
the company for the call out.

Everyone won. It gave the customer the chance to consider their issue again
and if it was actually critical for their operation.

Just some food for thought. It also beat the scammers (never had a single
one escalated through the IVR - it’s not like we could have charged them
either, but a risk we were willing to take.)

On Mon, 17 Sep 2018 at 5:29 pm, Matthew Moyle-Croft <mmc at mmc.com.au> wrote:

> Hi,
> I’ve got to agree with this. A properly scripted/documented list will
> reduce engineer call outs (improving staff morale) and, more importantly,
> mean that if they get woken up they know it’s worth doing something about.
>
> MMC
>
> On 17 Sep 2018, at 4:55 pm, Kisakye Alex <kisakye at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think what a human provides is the ability to sort through tickets for
> what can wait until morning and what needs the engineer to wake up. If you
> are forwarding the calls directly to an engineer on call, then half the
> time s/he is making decisions on whether to get up or not.
>
> Alex
>
> On Mon, Sep 17, 2018 at 12:09 AM Chad Kelly <chad at cpkws.com.au> wrote:
>
>> With most modern PBX systems they will tell you if it's a PBX call and
>> give you the option to either answer the call or hang up.
>>
>> Or you can send the call to an answering machine which means you can get
>> to the issue the next morning.
>>
>> If you are running services that are mission critical that you need the
>> phone answered 24/7 then you really need someone in the office who is
>> awake and functioning but given what has been discussed a decent PBX
>> would be fine as even if you wanted to redirect calls to a call centre
>> ware a human answers that is also an option, though less needed.
>>
>> As a voicemail system would be a lot cheaper and tickets work better for
>> more complex issues anyway.
>>
>> Regards Chad.
>>
>>
>>
>> On 9/17/2018 4:50 PM, Andrew Jones wrote:
>> > I can see the benefit of having someone else take the call. I can
>> remember my days as an on call engineer years ago where I would get a phone
>> call from  the NOC in the middle of the night, I would need to keep a pen
>> and paper by the bed to write down basic details, as in my just woken
>> state, I would forget whatever I was told 2 seconds later.
>> >
>> > You don’t want end customers talking to someone who just woke up
>> seconds ago, as they won't be in a state to properly take down details and
>> provide a mechanism to follow up (ticket numbers etc)
>> >
>> > Cheers,
>> > Andrew Jones
>> > 0435 658 228
>> >
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From: AusNOG <ausnog-bounces at lists.ausnog.net> On Behalf Of Chad Kelly
>> > Sent: Monday, 17 September 2018 4:35 PM
>> > To: ausnog at lists.ausnog.net; ausnog-request at lists.ausnog.net
>> > Subject: Re: [AusNOG] after hours staff requirement
>> >
>> > On 9/17/2018 12:00 PM, ausnog-request at lists.ausnog.net wrote:
>> >
>> >> I'm looking for a company to take on our level 1 support, after hours.
>> >> 10pm - 8am AEST
>> >> 7 days a week, including public holidays.
>> >> Would prefer a local Australian company, but will consider
>> >> International too.
>> >> Require a team of sorts, that handles other companies too as it's not
>> >> financially viable to have a team dedicated to us as the volume of
>> >> calls is bugger all.
>> >>
>> >> We'll just redirect the 1300 number to you during those times, a
>> >> simple greeting, take down notes and urgency, check the on-call
>> >> calendar and call the Engineer to action.
>> >> Basically, I need you to wake up the Engineer on call:)
>> > Frankly if this is all you need a decent phone system will do this
>> without you needing to hire an outsourcing company.
>> > Most decent PBX systems will redirect to a mobile after hours or better
>> yet straight to an answering machine that will email a voicemail message to
>> an engineer.
>> > That way they can decide if the message is important enough to bother
>> doing anything about, and frankly if you offer an on call service you
>> should be charging enough that it deters  unwanted callers from ringing you
>> in the middle of the night anyway.
>> > This is why we don't advertise 24/7 support as idiots randomly spam the
>> ticket system with rubbish which you then need to delete anyway.
>> > We offer support for critical issues on weekends for existing customers
>> only.
>> > Your PBX also should have a decent blacklist function for telemarketers.
>> >
>> > Regards Chad.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Chad Kelly
>> > Manager
>> > CPK Web Services
>> > Phone 03 5273 0246
>> > Web www.cpkws.com.au
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > AusNOG mailing list
>> > AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
>> > http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>>
>> --
>> Chad Kelly
>> Manager
>> CPK Web Services
>> Phone 03 5273 0246
>> Web www.cpkws.com.au
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> AusNOG mailing list
>> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
>> http://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>>
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-- 

Kind Regards,
*Nick Pratley*
P: 0448 379 418
E: nick at npratley.net
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