Intercession.net understands that our
clients and prospective clients can be concerned that we do not offer
phone support. Let us explain why Intercession.net does not give out
Teir1 (Level1) support phone numbers.
First and foremost, Intercession.net
offers excellent support via our ticket system. Our clients comment to
us constantly, that we're always surprisingly responsive and it is
easier to track the problem/solution via the ticket system. Online
support is what Intercession.net does well, very well. Our
support team is on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. All that
is required for help is for you to enter a trouble ticket from
our web site.
Now, imagine for a moment, if
Intercession.net had a catastrophe occur, and our ENTIRE operation was
to go offline. For example, our host datacenter went down, then
Intercession.net would also be down. That is over 5000 of our client's
web sites all going down at the same moment.
Now imagine if Intercession.net had a
Tier1 technical support phone number, and that just 10% of our clients
start calling us. That would be about 500 people all calling us at one
time. Every single one of them telling us their site is down, which we
already know, and yelling at us about what a terrible company we are,
etc.
Who does that help? No one. It keeps us
from actually working on the problem. It prevents us from working on
the problem and getting services online. Plus, it causes us
frustration because we get verbally abused at by hundreds of people
for something completely out of our control.
Now, that is an extreme example, but
certainly an understandable one.
Lets look at a more "normal" situation
where 1 server hangs and needs to be rebooted. In that case, 100-200
clients down, for 15 minutes while Intercession.net support reboots
the server. That would produce another 20+ calls, again, telling us
something we already know, and are already working on.
Intercession.net monitors everything, and it is very rare for a client
to see a problem before our support team does.
Intercession.net realizes having a
phone number would be a "nice" thing to have, and that it would
certainly make some clients more comfortable doing business with us.
But, from an operational perspective it makes no sense for us.
I hope this helps explain. If you have
questions or concerns, please contact me directly.
Chris Bracken
support@intercession.net
