Client-oriented "cloud": Experience 1cloud

When a company transfers its infrastructure to the cloud environment, this implies that part of the tasks and responsibilities are shifted onto the shoulders of an external service provider. Thanks to this, the company's IT department can start thinking strategically, plan costs more intelligently and develop the business in the necessary direction, without thinking about supporting the equipment.

If a business does not have to allocate resources to support and provide infrastructure, this gives it an edge over its competitors if they still purchase their own equipment (and also rent space for servers, pay for electricity). The opportunity to send the released budget funds to the development of the project allows you to get ahead of "rivals".
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The situation with the development of cloud technologies can be compared with life in the modern metropolis. Residents of apartment buildings are not engaged in the maintenance of plumbing and electrical networks, do not repair entrances and elevators themselves - for all this there are specially trained people working in “external” organizations.

Moreover, it is quite obvious that if a person is an expert in any one case (for example, he is a professional plumber), then he will do the job better than “the Swiss, the reaper, and the dumb player”.

A similar situation arises with cloud providers. The provider has the resources to enable it to hire the best specialists, ensure the security of both data and equipment, and effectively use the existing infrastructure. However, in this business the critical point is the trust of customers, which must be earned, and then also maintained.



It is not enough to provide quality services, it is necessary to equally provide decent customer service. Even if your company is the best in the city, but you do not know how to work with clients - you will not go far.

With any product or service from time to time there are problems, so users need to go somewhere, where they can help and explain the reason. Many believe that support lies outside the basic indicators of the quality of the services provided, and it is enough just to put a couple of people on the phones.

We in 1cloud believe that technical support is the face of the service, so we devote a large amount of attention and time to it. Today, our technical support works 365 days a year in 24/7 format, and the response time of employees to an incoming request, on average, does not exceed 5 minutes. The staff of this department has 30 people who are qualified and have a wide variety of skills.

When the company was just starting its way, the same people were engaged in absolutely all the problems of customers, and it turned out that highly qualified and highly paid employees "resolved" typical and commonplace tasks. Additional problems were created by the low level of automation of typical user tasks, which increased the load on the call center and, as a result, technical support worked slowly.

This situation did not suit us at all, because it was decided to reorganize the support work.

How we improved customer service

We tried to follow the principles of ITIL. In essence, ITIL is the best practices, following which considerably facilitates work and helps to organize work in an IT company. In general, on the subject of ITIL a lot of good literature, but we recommend our specialists to the book “Mastering ITIL. Skeptical guide for responsible persons "Rob Inglanda.

During the restructuring, we were able to distinguish three levels of support, the responsibility of each of which extends into different zones. Employees of the "first level" have basic knowledge in the administration of the operating systems Windows, Linux and others, own infrastructure monitoring tools and have an idea of ​​the principles of its construction.

The second “line of defense” knows the above issues in more depth, but in addition it owns a line of VMware software products (vCloud Director, vSphere, etc.) and has specific knowledge of network infrastructure and data storage systems.

As for the third level of support, these people know the features of the implementation architecture of the 1cloud service and have in-depth knowledge of system administration and development on .NET, that is, they deal with the most complex and interesting issues.



In addition to working on the quality of technical support services provided, we are constantly improving the level of automation of processing user requests for existing services and in designing new services and service capabilities.

Our goal is to fully automate the ways that users interact with our service, that is, to reduce the human factor to a minimum, and to reduce request processing time. This will save time for both the client and the employee of the contact center and will lead to increased transparency in the timing of requests for users.

In general, the organization of the work of technical support is not an easy task. In dealing with this issue, many companies make serious mistakes. It is often possible to observe how company executives forget or do not want to discuss the mistakes of employees — no analysis of the main points is conducted, no advice is given. For example, in 1cloud such “debriefing” is conducted at least once a week.

What “rake” should be avoided

I think everyone understands how important it is for the technical support worker to always remain polite even in the most tense situations. Support is the face of the company, which should be friendly. It is worth compiling a list of instructions for employees on how to contact a client, how to request information of interest - to teach them to communicate correctly. But the most important thing is to explain to them how to politely refuse the client. You need to be able to correctly say no, so that the user does not have the impression that he is not appreciated.

The technical support worker should be able to apologize for the mistakes made by the IT department, even if this is not the case. The user does not care because of whom the problem arose, he needs someone who will take responsibility for the error and help fix it. All this is a very subtle point that we pay close attention to during weekly meetings.

Another mistake that cloud providers often make is the lack of proper control and formalization of changes in infrastructure. Improving the quality of service and provision of services is achieved due to the presence of a single database of configuration elements and configurations, which ensures quick and timely detection of failures, reduction in the time of their detection, diagnosis and elimination, and allows you to actively monitor the quality of services provided. In other words, it is proposed to implement incident, release, change and configuration management.

At work, anything happens. Anything can break down, so engineers have to fix the equipment, and support staff explain the situation to customers. To then correctly build a report on the work done, you need to implement one of the incident management systems. This will enable communication with management and customers - they will know what work has been done to improve the provision of IT services, and what work is being done at present. Also need to inform users about potential problems or upcoming maintenance.

Any replacement of important equipment, all changes to server settings, must be documented - this is the so-called configuration management. When managing configurations, in most cases they use the so-called “Configuration Elements Database” (CMDB), which is a logical mapping of the IT infrastructure.

A properly implemented CMDB is a structure that effectively supports ITIL processes. It contains all the available hardware and software solutions, as well as the names of the company's personnel. Each entry in the database is called a configuration unit, and any request must necessarily be associated with one of them. It is also highly preferable to introduce a change request system when any hardware configuration change is recorded and approved.

findings

It is worth noting that you do not need to stop there. To maintain the image of the company, all employees, and especially technical support staff, must constantly evolve. It is good if the leaders organize any advanced training courses and thematic competitions.

A great idea would be to conduct business games on a wide variety of topics, including ITIL (cleverics.ru is one of the resources). In general, the employee must develop as a person and be able to find the “key” to each of the clients who apply to him.

PS Additional materials about our work:

• How we created a load tracking system for user servers
• How we did our DNS management system based on ANS product
• High performance and hosting infrastructure: Experience 1cloud
• About different types of disks on the same virtual machine