URGENT status abuse

[DavidP]

Hey folks,

I'm seeing a *LOT* of abuse of the urgent status. I know everyone wants their issues responded to immediately, but let's put this into perspective for everyone.

Imagine the following scenario:

Your most important server is ENTIRELY OFFLINE. Nobody can get to your sites and you are losing revenue.

Now look at the ticket you are just about to open with us. Would you prefer to have us bring your server back online before handling that ticket, or do you need us to handle that ticket before we bring the servers back online?

If that ticket is critical enough for us to IGNORE your server being offline until it is handled, then that ticket qualifies as urgent.

If that ticket should wait until AFTER we bring your server back online, then it is NOT urgent.

What is happening here is that I'm seeing a lot of "Urgent! Please recompile PHP to PHP5" type tickets, and those are clogging up that special queue we reserve for servers down.

While I understand that having PHP5 can be really important, it is not as important as other customers whose servers are down, causing them to lose revenue. Please remember when opening an urgent ticket that you are taking a tech away from handling servers that are entirely offline by opening that ticket. Is the ticket really THAT important?

[DeanClinton]

Hi David, hopefully that'll clear up the problems of delays caused to others that wait patiently in line for support only to be queue jumped by people abusing the Urgent status :D

Why don't you ask an Admin to rename the Urgent status in Kayako to Server Offline :)



btw Happy New Year DefTech staff!

[quarghost]

Why don't you ask an Admin to rename the Urgent status in Kayako to Server Offline

Actually, severity levels are the one thing in the new ticketing system I don't like. It's arbitrary really, isn't it? What's the difference between 1 and 2? Red yellow and green are pretty clear, but still too many choices. I'm with Dean on this one. I like:


Not time sensitive.
Normal.
Server outage.

[Fred]

i do like the severity level like 1 to 5...
We have to think like we think about pain...

If a doctor asks you to rate your pain on 10 ( 10 is so worse you would like to die or fall in coma to avoid it ... ), every one will be honest... Everyone knows that a 10 would be far more painfull than a normal pain...

We have to think like: Is this ticket so important ?

You do severity level or you use "clear" words that means urgent... Urgent isn't a good word.
About every tickets i sent are urgent... except the "i need informations" tickets... But i do not use the word "urgent" except if the vps is down or (before i upgrade) the load was so high the vps is unreacheable...

If you change the Urgent word for "Server DOWN" or "VPS down" ... It will be very clear... If the ticket doesn't contains problem about a vps down... you are right to critic the customer about the way he's using the ticket system...

BUT i do think peoples abuse the ticket system word Urgent because the answering time is longer than before... And this is important ... Every year, the answering time is longer...

I think powervps has to reach a better answering time... without lowering the quality of the replies... I often receive a short replies and i considered that the tech was trying to close the ticket and wasn't really trying to understand the problem...

Sorry for the long post... and sorry for my not-perfect-english :)

[Daniel]

We're trying to move to a more standard severity level system with the new helpdesk. These are the definitions for the Severity levels in Kayako:

Severity 1 = 15 minute response time
Severity 2 = 4 hour response time
Severity 3 = 24 hour response time
Non-urgent = "When we can get to it"

So... for example... let's say you're having some issues with X on your website, but the server is not completely down. In this case you probably want to use a Severity Level 2 so that you get a quick response time, but it is not COMPLETELY down.

If you're curious about what a parked domain is and if you should have one, but it isn't a life or death question, that would be a good Non-urgent ticket. While it is technically "When we get to it", I doubt there would be any point of time when it took more than 4-6 hours to get a reply to that.

Hope that helps clear some things up on why we're doing this.

[quarghost]

These are the definitions for the Severity levels in Kayako:

[...]

Hope that helps clear some things up on why we're doing this.

Hey, as long as they're clearly spelled out, I don't think it matters what we call the severity levels.

My biggest complaint is that they're not clearly spelled out (at least not in a place obvious enough for me to find it). Now that there's something in the forum, at least that's a precedence.

[vps-vince]

The problem is 'human' perception, and everyone has differing opinions. Severity levels are arbitary at best.

Why not enforce explicit definitions in the subject of each ticket?
Anyone marking a ticket 'Urgent' should then provide a brief description.
Taking as example what has already been mentioned by DavidP
Subject: URGENT - server down
or
Subject: URGENT - cPanel down

Maybe PowerVPS techs with all their experience of what would classify as urgent situations could provide some input and give some of the most common examples?

Other than that, you can start giving ratings to abusers that would result in penalising them so next urgent ticket they submit would be downgraded to same as normal respoinse times?

- Vince

[quarghost]

Subject: URGENT - server down
or
Subject: URGENT - cPanel down

I don't use cPanel, but isn't this basically just on another instance of Apache? So theoretically cPanel being out wouldn't classify as urgent as say, something like the 350% server load problem we were experiencing on HSPC node 3 a couple days back.

But then, httpd and company could be working splendidly and a user could lock port 25 on their firewall thus bouncing all inbound mail. I know of a lot of my customers that would find that 100% urgent!

In my mind however, urgent should be reserved for "node on fire" type of things. My server bouncing inbound mail is 100% urgent for me to fix for my customers, but is this really urgent for PVPS? I have a feeling that these type of tickets are exactly what is driving up the ticket response times. Please, please correct me if I'm wrong. Don't want to give the wrong impression to future readers of this thread...

[vps-vince]

All I was trying to suggest is that if we put a 'brief' explanation after the word URGENT in the ticket subject, the the Techs and mamangement can assess the situation better than just saying urgent.

Hence my example:
Subject: URGENT - cPanel down

For me, cPanel down is important as it being down affects a lot of the features my hosted clients expect and use.

Therefore, a list of what is considered urgent by PowerVPS mamangement would also be usefull - or even a dynamic dropdown box next to the status selction?

That way, if we select status as 'Uregnt' it would then pre-fill the dynamic dropdown next to it with ONLY what PowerVPS consider as urgent, and we can only select from those.

I think this idea has legs, but would be interested in the opinion of others, especially DavidP as he raised this as an important point to resolve.

Best wishes,

- Vince