Notify at any cost about the fall of the site. Practical advice
What to do when you need to convey information to the client? And no, this is not about annoying newsletters about promotions and special offers. If the essence of the services really is that the client should know something in time? The HostTracker website monitoring service , whose duties include immediately notifying customers of any problems, shares experience. You can plunge into problems and requests below.
HostTracker is committed to checking sites and various client resources and notifying you in case of problems. The goal is to minimize the time when the site is down. Therefore, it is critical to notify the customer at all costs. At the moment, there are such methods as SMS, Viber, Skype, Hangouts, email, phone call and POST request. Below, I will say a few words about each.
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SMS is the fastest and most reliable delivery method on a global scale. But there are a few problems.
The first is that customers do not like to leave their number to anyone. Solution: you need to prove that you are not one. That is, no advertising, only in the case, and only in those cases to which the client consciously agreed (and not just “forgot to remove the check mark” on the three-screen sheet).
The second - in fact, reliability. Our problem is that our services are used by clients from more than one hundred countries of the world. Fortunately, there are now many companies that offer global SMS delivery. Unfortunately, they all have their drawbacks. For example, the cost of shipping to a particular country can vary greatly. And somewhere may not reach at all. Only experiment will help here. There were times when we used 5 SMS gateways at once. They even suggested that customers choose by themselves using test SMS what exactly works for them. But, of course, this complicates life, so now we automatically install one of two gateways for our customers: Infobip or Tvilio. The first is well suited for Europe, Russia, and most Asian countries. The second is very profitable, first of all, for the USA and Canada. This way of working for 99.9% of clients. What about the rest? Either we adjust manually, or we incur insignificant losses, delivering SMS at rates higher than estimated. Ce la vie.
The third is the cost. As mentioned above, SMS costs money. And, to admit honestly, several times we fell on quite good sums due to bugs that allowed their unlimited use in some situations. Therefore, you need to carefully consider the scenario of using SMS, as well as their payment by the user. If you want to provide the user with the service "out of the box" and not force him to think about the required volume of mailings - you need to quite accurately estimate how much SMS can really get. We have solved this problem in the following way: first, the number of contacts is limited (especially in the lower packages), and secondly, each package contains a certain amount of SMS, which are sufficient with an average number of contacts and an average operating scenario. If someone is not enough - we offer to pay extra.
Viber is useful because a) is more convenient for some customers and b) allows us to save on SMS. By the way, it will still be necessary to use Viber on an industrial scale for money, but much cheaper than SMS. In addition, in the case of Viber, it is possible to establish a single tariff for the whole world - 1 cent. And the last bun is a larger message size compared to SMS (especially in the case of Cyrillic), so some alerts, which take 2-3 SMS, “wake up” into one Waiberian, which is quite a ball. With Viber, again, we work through Infobip.
Voice call is the least popular. But it is indispensable for certain categories of customers. Someone just more willingly uses the phone. Someone can put a redirect to a home / work number. Someone SMS can not wake up in the middle of the night, and repeated calls - just right. Given that the service is paid (and relatively expensive), this can be provided as a pleasant bonus to customers of the Business and Premium level.
Email
Alert statistics for a certain period of time:
As you can see, mail is the most popular method, more than 70% of alerts are sent in this way. But its value understates somewhat that it is free and obligatory. Free - so it is used by all owners of free and trial packages, and almost no one, even deciding to abandon the service, does not bother to immediately unsubscribe. Mandatory - since the email address must be entered during registration, it is automatically marked as the main contact and by default all messages are duplicated on it.
The reliability of this method is lame - the client finds out about the problem only when checking emails, and sometimes these alerts generally get spammed. Nevertheless, for many it is useful to receive a letter in the box as a single or duplicate alert.
Are needed. Currently supported by Hangouts and Skype, via Microsoft Skype Bot. Previously, Skype was bolted homemade artisanal methods and often fell off. And although there are also problems with a bot, other ways are even worse. I thought to write more about this, but I already found some excellent instructions on this subject .
This is an HTTP POST request.
In the case of an event (for example, a site crash), a specific request is made to a specific address. This can help automate the process by reloading something or running some fantastic script. For example, generate a letter of apology to the client, close all the toys on the developer's machine and cook the admin coffee . With the internet of things - why not?
We do not use them. It would seem a simple, popular and effective way that everyone uses. But that's the problem. The habits of using these notifications are very individual. And now we do not take into account a fairly large number of people whom they, in principle, annoy . Even among fans of alerts, there are those who subscribe to everything (respectively, important information can easily be lost in the general stream), or those that treat them as work or entertainment, respectively, alerts that arrive during off-hours are ignored Or else, in general, such a mode of operation of devices is chosen, in which they do not come. It describes the situations in which the use of push alerts is justified. For most HostTrecker purposes, for example, this is not appropriate. At least, we have set this task as not the first priority.
In the plans, at the request of customers, we plan to introduce Telegram, Jabber and some other utilities. So do not hesitate to write suggestions, recommendations and ideas.
If the service is interesting, then on Habré you can already find detailed descriptions of what it is , what it can do and who may need it .
Why is important
HostTracker is committed to checking sites and various client resources and notifying you in case of problems. The goal is to minimize the time when the site is down. Therefore, it is critical to notify the customer at all costs. At the moment, there are such methods as SMS, Viber, Skype, Hangouts, email, phone call and POST request. Below, I will say a few words about each.
')
There is nowhere more reliable, or why the client will entrust you with his number
SMS is the fastest and most reliable delivery method on a global scale. But there are a few problems.
The first is that customers do not like to leave their number to anyone. Solution: you need to prove that you are not one. That is, no advertising, only in the case, and only in those cases to which the client consciously agreed (and not just “forgot to remove the check mark” on the three-screen sheet).
The second - in fact, reliability. Our problem is that our services are used by clients from more than one hundred countries of the world. Fortunately, there are now many companies that offer global SMS delivery. Unfortunately, they all have their drawbacks. For example, the cost of shipping to a particular country can vary greatly. And somewhere may not reach at all. Only experiment will help here. There were times when we used 5 SMS gateways at once. They even suggested that customers choose by themselves using test SMS what exactly works for them. But, of course, this complicates life, so now we automatically install one of two gateways for our customers: Infobip or Tvilio. The first is well suited for Europe, Russia, and most Asian countries. The second is very profitable, first of all, for the USA and Canada. This way of working for 99.9% of clients. What about the rest? Either we adjust manually, or we incur insignificant losses, delivering SMS at rates higher than estimated. Ce la vie.
The third is the cost. As mentioned above, SMS costs money. And, to admit honestly, several times we fell on quite good sums due to bugs that allowed their unlimited use in some situations. Therefore, you need to carefully consider the scenario of using SMS, as well as their payment by the user. If you want to provide the user with the service "out of the box" and not force him to think about the required volume of mailings - you need to quite accurately estimate how much SMS can really get. We have solved this problem in the following way: first, the number of contacts is limited (especially in the lower packages), and secondly, each package contains a certain amount of SMS, which are sufficient with an average number of contacts and an average operating scenario. If someone is not enough - we offer to pay extra.
Viber and voice
Viber is useful because a) is more convenient for some customers and b) allows us to save on SMS. By the way, it will still be necessary to use Viber on an industrial scale for money, but much cheaper than SMS. In addition, in the case of Viber, it is possible to establish a single tariff for the whole world - 1 cent. And the last bun is a larger message size compared to SMS (especially in the case of Cyrillic), so some alerts, which take 2-3 SMS, “wake up” into one Waiberian, which is quite a ball. With Viber, again, we work through Infobip.
Voice call is the least popular. But it is indispensable for certain categories of customers. Someone just more willingly uses the phone. Someone can put a redirect to a home / work number. Someone SMS can not wake up in the middle of the night, and repeated calls - just right. Given that the service is paid (and relatively expensive), this can be provided as a pleasant bonus to customers of the Business and Premium level.
Alert statistics for a certain period of time:
As you can see, mail is the most popular method, more than 70% of alerts are sent in this way. But its value understates somewhat that it is free and obligatory. Free - so it is used by all owners of free and trial packages, and almost no one, even deciding to abandon the service, does not bother to immediately unsubscribe. Mandatory - since the email address must be entered during registration, it is automatically marked as the main contact and by default all messages are duplicated on it.
The reliability of this method is lame - the client finds out about the problem only when checking emails, and sometimes these alerts generally get spammed. Nevertheless, for many it is useful to receive a letter in the box as a single or duplicate alert.
Do I need IM services
Are needed. Currently supported by Hangouts and Skype, via Microsoft Skype Bot. Previously, Skype was bolted homemade artisanal methods and often fell off. And although there are also problems with a bot, other ways are even worse. I thought to write more about this, but I already found some excellent instructions on this subject .
Automation: Tribute to Developers
This is an HTTP POST request.
In the case of an event (for example, a site crash), a specific request is made to a specific address. This can help automate the process by reloading something or running some fantastic script. For example, generate a letter of apology to the client, close all the toys on the developer's machine and cook the admin coffee . With the internet of things - why not?
So push the same alerts?
We do not use them. It would seem a simple, popular and effective way that everyone uses. But that's the problem. The habits of using these notifications are very individual. And now we do not take into account a fairly large number of people whom they, in principle, annoy . Even among fans of alerts, there are those who subscribe to everything (respectively, important information can easily be lost in the general stream), or those that treat them as work or entertainment, respectively, alerts that arrive during off-hours are ignored Or else, in general, such a mode of operation of devices is chosen, in which they do not come. It describes the situations in which the use of push alerts is justified. For most HostTrecker purposes, for example, this is not appropriate. At least, we have set this task as not the first priority.
To learn more
In the plans, at the request of customers, we plan to introduce Telegram, Jabber and some other utilities. So do not hesitate to write suggestions, recommendations and ideas.
If the service is interesting, then on Habré you can already find detailed descriptions of what it is , what it can do and who may need it .
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/320690/
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