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.
