Hank Luhring’s Blog

We like to visit customers in their offices whenever we get the chance.  Recently one customer said that before IssueTrak, their helpdesk people were considered the company nerds! The rest of the company didn’t really appreciate the value they brought to the organization.

After the company installed IssueTrak, things changed.  IssueTrak allowed the “nerds” to appear much more responsive to the rest of the organizations needs.  For example, if a technician added a note to someone’s issue, an email automatically got sent to the person needing help.  Likewise, if a problem was fixed, and the issue closed, an email gets sent informing the person right away.  The end result was that the people interacting with the helpdesk felt like they were getting much better service.  They felt like the helpdesk was on top of things because of the increased communiction.  They started appreciating all the work the helpdesk nerds did for them!

It’s one thing to buy a software program that you yourself will use.  It’s quite a different matter when picking out a program that your colleagues and customers will use as well.  You don’t want to make a mistake!

An important factor when selecting an enterprise-wide software application is how well will the company support its product.  Can you get someone on the phone quickly?  Does the company even offer telephone support?  Not all do.

We have a top-notch tech support team, and they make it a priority to answer the phone quickly.  Our sales engineers like to use that to their advantage.  When a prospect asks about our support,  the sales engineer will sometimes say “Let’s try this.  Put me on hold right now.  Then call our support team — (757) 213-1351.  Let me know how it goes!”.  It always goes well.  Our support team is awesome.

We continually monitor the quality of support, and one way we do this is through surveys.  We send out a survey after every support issue.  Besides the typical numeric scores, we also collect comments about the support experience.  Here are a few that have been sent in lately:

“I love you guys!!!  Mike was right on with his support as is the whole team there.  IssueTrak support rates an A+ in an industry that is plagued with D- attitudes”.

“Chuck Shockley quickly resolves every issue we come up with!  Thanks Chuck!”

“Service was exceptional — I submitted the issue on your support site and I received a phone call — couldn’t be any faster.  The support tech upgraded my IssueTrak and went the extra step and applied hotfixes that he knew were out.  I really appreciate the personal service we always receive from IsseuTrak”.

“Paul was extremely knowledgeable, polite, and the upgrade went flawlessly.  I’m already getting comments from our users on how much better it is.  Your support group is leading edge and has never let us down.  Excellent work!”

“We are planning to go live soon as we are in the final stages of customizing IssueTrak for our workflow.  It is very useful to be able to contact Support with questions!”

“Patrick and Chuck have been very helpful in diagnosing the problem with me on this issue and many issues in the past.  They are great assets for the IssueTrak help desk team and resolve our issues in a very timely fashion.”

“Noel is always very patient, coureous, and helpful.”

“Your support department is the best I have worked with in my 20 years in the IT fiel.  I am very serious about that statement.  The staff has taken great strides to provide not only support but education to your customers.”

“As always, the support was top-notch.  I wish every company I had to deal with was as knowledgeable and courteous as your staff!”

“My question was answered VERY promptly — love the product!”

“I have really enjoyed the support experiences I have had with your company.  I am impressed by your responsiveness and quick response.  Even better, I am very happy with getting fast and correct answers from your staff.”

“Patrick exemplifies exactly what customer service at a support help desk should be like.  He took his time (not rushing) to walk and talk me through steps regarding my reporting functions.  Thank you again Patrick for assisting me in achieving my end result regarding my reporting structure.”

“I love the service that IssueTrak provides.  It is always quick and helpful and paitent with me.  Thanks for offering quality service!”

“Dino provided excellent service.  She called right away when I submitted my issue, and when she wasn’t available followed up to get in touch with me.  When we were able to connect, she solved the problem quickly and easily, as well as showing me how to use another aspect of the system to improve our business.  Great support!  Thanks!”

“I use your excellent customer service as an example to train my own support team.  Keep up the great work!!”

“Julian is awesome!  He is very supportive in so many ways.  Not only does he assist in fixing the issue he also educates his customers!  Julian rocks!  But you’re still not getting any chocolate…you guys are too hyper as is!”  (These comments are anonymous, but we think this one could be from one of our favorite customers who happens to work at Hershey!)

Thanks for reading through these.  I get great ones all the time, and I didn’t want to keep them to myself!

A friend of mine, a  hospital administrator, sent me an article about the use of checklists in healthcare — http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122226184

The article discusses the book “The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right” by Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School.  Checklists are a simple tool, yet amazingly effective.  Airplane pilots have used them for years.  Dr. Gawande uses checklists himself in surgery. In the article he says “I have not gotten through a week of surgery where the checklist has not caught a problem.”.

Checklists are also quite useful in business.  Our IssueTrak customers implement checklists using the tasks function.  We have one customer who has a standard set of tasks (or “checklist”) for bringing on a new employee that has over 80 steps.

Internally, we use checklists implemented via IssueTrak to specify all kinds of processes, from adding a new hosted customer, doing an onsite customer visit, sending out an evaluation copy to a prospect, to the old stand-by, adding a new employee.

In the current economic environment, where fewer people are doing more work, it is more important than ever to be sure processes are spelled out, and followed.  We see more and more customers doing that with IssueTrak.

At IssueTrak we like to visit customers at their offices to see first hand the challenges they face, and how our software is working out for them.  Recently four of us went on a routine visit to a customer close by.  On the drive over I noticed Mike, our support manager, was doing some texting, but I had no idea what it was about.

When we got there, the IT director mentioned she liked IssueTrak a lot, but she said lately it was running slowly, especially when marking tasks on an issue as being completed.  We asked her to show us.  She brought up an issue that had the most tasks I’d ever seen on one issue — there were over 75.  This was an issue to bring on a new employee.  It had HR tasks, IT tasks, facilities tasks, and more.

She marked a task as being done, and the speed was not bad.  She was surprised.  She said it used to take much longer.  Mike mentioned that there had been a problem, but it had been fixed.  The IT director was very impressed; they had called support just 45 minutes ago!

Here’s what happened — they called support, and spoke to our support rep Patrick.  Patrick realized that this was the same customer that his boss Mike was about to go visit.  So he immediately went to Mike and told him.  They called in other resources and determined that we had a hot fix that would solve the problem.  This customer was a hosted customer — their IssueTrak application ran on our servers, not theirs.  So while Mike and the rest of us were driving over to the customer’s office, the support people were applying the hot fix.  The texting that I saw was Mike and Patrick and others communicating about the progress of the hotfix installation.

The installation was completed just as we walked into the customer’s conference room.  They were pleased to see that the problem  had been taken care of so quickly.

It would have been very easy for things not to have gone so well.  Mike had done a good job communicating to his team that he was going to visit a particular customer.  Patrick was on his toes to recognize the particular customer when they called in.  He showed good initiative in contacting others within the company to get that hotfix applied pronto.  The others who applied the hotfix were great to respond to Patrick’s request for help so quickly.

It can be frustrating sometimes when dealing with a company where lots of different people in the company need to work together to get something done.  It seems like often someone drops the ball.  It pleases me no end that this rarely happens at IssueTrak.  When a customer or prospect has interactions with our people, they come away pleased.  And it seems the more contacts an outsider has with different areas of IssueTrak, the more impressed they are that we are a team of people who listen well, figure out what needs to be done, and then gets that done, whatever it might be.

In a software company, the people side of things is very important, and we’ve got that down very well.

One of our sales engineers recently received this email from a customer:

“I want to thank you again for all the support and willingness to help. There aren’t many software companies with the level of customer service you guys provide. As a result our business leaders are embracing IssueTrak and our user base is growing. ”

It wasn’t that earth-shattering a situation.  The customer had two separate instances of IssueTrak running.  He wanted to combine them into one instance because of a company reorganization.  He wanted to transfer the licenses from one instance to the other.  We told him no problem, there would be no charge.  We would just need to send him a new license key reflecting the additional users on the one instance.  He was pleasantly surprised, and said great, he’d get back to us.

He called a few days later, apologetic, saying he needed the license keys right away; that day.  Again, our sales engineer said no problem, and promptly got the new license key to him so their IT people could make the change quickly.  He has some additional questions about how a third group might use IssueTrak, and we’ve set up a meeting with our Professional Services people to give him guidance.

Our software is great, but the product is not the only facet of what makes a good software company.  It is especially gratifying to me that the more contact a prospect has with people at IssueTrak, the more likely they are to buy.  They find that our sales engineers are top-notch.  Our support people are friendly and get problems resolved quickly.  Sometimes our developers will get involved when a prospect has a question.  When every touch a prospect has with our company results in a good experience, we end up getting more sales, and more satisfied customers.

We enjoy what we do, and we do it well!

I enjoy visiting customers, and seeing first-hand how they use IssueTrak.  This week several of us visited a very large company who happened to be using IssueTrak in a facility here in Virginia.  The reason why they were in the market for an incident tracking application is interesting.

They had developed one inihouse.  They showed it to us during the visit.  It did the job, but after a few years they wanted to improve it.  The person who had written the application had been laid off due to the economy.  Another fellow in the help desk knew programming, so he decided to look at the code to see if he could make the improvements they needed.

He looked at the code, and discovered that it was written in Korean!  They concluded they could not modify the program themselves, so they searched for web-based ticketing systems, and chose IssueTrak.

There are some circumstances where a custom application is exactly what’s needed.  But there are risks involved in creating an application from scratch in-house.  Very rarely are such projects completed within the estimated time-frame.  Custom applications need to be supported once they are deployed.  People are transferred, promoted, or leave for greener pastures.  These personnel changes are disruptive on two fronts — when the development and support personnel change, problems with the application cannot be handled.  Also, when there are personnel changes on the end-user side, this too can be disruptive, and can create significant support calls to the in-house resource who developed the package.

Problems arising with custom programming because it is written in a foreign language doesn’t happen that often.  But we encounter situations on a regular basis where a well-intentioned effort to develop something in-house doesn’t work out, and the organization chooses IssueTrak or some other off-the-shelf package to do the job instead.

I heard about Yammer from the TWIST podcast (This Week In STartups).  TWIST is hosted by Jason Calicanis, a frequent guest on TWIT (This Week In Tech), and CEO of Mahalo.com, a human-powered search engine.

I was listening today to Jason talking with David Sacks, the CEO of Yammer.  David also founded Geni.com, and before that he was a co-founder of PayPal.

Both Yammer.com and Geni.com are really nice Web 2.0 applications.  Check out Geni.com and see how easy it is to get started on your family tree.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything THAT easy!

At Geni.com, they needed an internal application for collaboration, so they wrote one.  It has elements of Twitter and Facebook, but is private, and internal to the company.

The application they wrote worked so well for them that they decided to start another company dedicated to that application.  That’s what is now Yammer. 

I thought it might be good to try Yammer out at IssueTrak.  I thought I’d start small, so I invited just three people, and then quickly jumped over to Outlook and composed an email explaining about Yammer.   Before I could hit “send” the people I invited had invited lots of other IssueTrak people, they had uploaded their photos, they had posted messages.  I’ve never seen anything take off so fast!  I quickly sent a followup email saying go ahead, invite everyone in the company! 

IssueTrak has been on Yammer for less than an hour.  There is an org chart fleshed out, and 20 people are enrolled already, several with their pictures uploaded!  Amazing!

There is a great new site to get answers to questions regarding servers, networking and general IT.  It’s called ServerFault.com.  It was set up by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky, the two fellows who created StackOverlow.com, probably the best site on the Internet to get programming questions answered.  StackOverflow is now getting over 3.5 million unique visitors per month.

Jeff Atwood writes a blog called Coding Horror.  Joel has Joel on Sofware. One of Joel’s popular posts  described questions to ask of a prospective employer if you’re looking for a programming job.  If the company doesn’t follow certain best practices, you might not want to work there.

Someone on ServerFault asked if there were similar questions to ask to see if a company was doing IT right.  Here’s the link to that post.

What was very interesting to me was that the question that got the most votes was “Do you use an incident/ticket tracking system?”.  As of this writing, that question got 37 votes.

The question “Do you perform system backups, and do test restores regularly?” got 33 votes.

We like to think that our type of software is important to organizations doing IT.  It was surprising to see that the use of tracking software for IT got even more votes than doing backups!

In her column in today’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan expresses the concern that with all the government activity taking place in developing spending plans, tax plans, additional regulations, new reforms, energy proposals, healthcare changes — we have to be careful not to kill the goose that lays the golden egg!  And what is this goose?  As Ms. Noonan describes it:

“The goose of course is the big, messy, spirited, inspiring, and sometimes in some respects damaging but on the whole brilliant and productive and priceless wealth-generator known as the free-market capitalist system.”

This is a quote from Graham Hill, who was recently on the Venture Voice podcast. Hill started a business called TreeHugger.com using his own money, and sold it several years later to the Discovery Channel for $10 million.

I started the company which became IssueTrak back in 1992, with no outside investment.  Not having a lot of money in the beginning can be a good thing.  It forces you to focus on what the market wants.  And like Graham Hill says in the podcast, the early experiences determine the DNA of the business. 

In our case, doing extensive custom programming early on forced us to listen closely to what customers need so that we could implement an effective software solution.  Today we continue to add features the customers ask for.

I highly recommend the Venture Voice series by Greg Galant.  Here’s a link to the Graham Hill podcast. I especially enjoyed some of the comments he made at the very end.  He said too much money can be bad for a company.  And you don’t need to be a non-profit to do good in the world.  A for-profit company can also be a vehicle for staying true to one’s values, and can give one the wherewithal to make meaningful contributions to society.