Picture the scene.
You’re a top private investigator with one of the best reputations in the industry for hunting down criminals and solving mysteries of all kinds. You solve 99.99% of your cases, and there’s a very long list of people who have hired you for your services and been delighted with the results.
You’re sitting at your office desk catching up on some paperwork, blinds down, dust motes drifting peacefully through the air. Suddenly the phone rings.
It’s the local police, and they need your help investigating a new, very urgent identity theft case. The family involved is highly influential and there’s a lot at stake. You carefully take down all the details and assure them that you’ll begin investigating straight away.
Although you always have several cases on at any one time, you try to give them all equal importance. Having said that, you understand the time-sensitive nature of the situation and how serious this is to the police, and you start working through the key details. You’re confident you can resolve this, but it will take a little time to investigate.
You’ve been hard at work for half an hour and you’ve made great progress so far. But before you can get any further, the phone rings again.
It’s the police officer who called you earlier. “Hey, how’s the case going?”
“It’s going well,” you reply, “I’m still investigating the finer details, but it looks promising so far.”
The police officer isn’t convinced. “I can’t even describe to you how important this is. The family is absolutely distraught. They’re calling us constantly, and they’re angry and frustrated.”
You’re used to this kind of urgency and you’ve learned not to take it personally. After all, it’s important that you stay calm even in the most demanding of situations in order to do the best job possible. You’re still frowning down at your notes and scribbling the odd extra question in the margin as you reply, “Please reassure them that I’m doing the best I can. I know that every minute counts, but I’ve been working on it non-stop as my top priority.”
The police officer still sounds just as agitated, and he’s beginning to lose patience. “But WHEN will it be sorted out? How much time will it take?”
You’re still trying to work through the problem at hand, but you put down your pen at this point. Frowning, you reply confusedly, “I have no idea how long it will take. How long does it take to solve a crime?”
Your question is genuine, but the police officer starts yelling. “Don’t be so flippant! Tell me more about the issue. They want more information. They want to know what’s going on. They want a resolution. They want an ETA!”
“I can’t give an ETA,” you say. “I literally have no idea how long this will take, or even how I could realistically guess how long it will take. It might be a simple, straightforward case or it might have all kinds of twists and turns. It could be resolved shortly, or it might take a while. We both know that.”
“At least give me more information,” the officer says. “There’s nothing I can really say at this point, and even if there were, it would be technical elements that wouldn’t mean anything to them,” you respond patiently. “I just need to get on with the investigation. By the time I’ve explained where I’ve got to so far, I could have done twice as much work on the actual case. The sooner you let me get on with it, the sooner I can get this resolved.”
“So what exactly am I supposed to tell the family? Their fortune and reputation is at stake here! You’re not helping! Just what kind of service are you providing here? I’m going to have to hire another investigator to get on this case. Our reputation is on the line, and you’re not taking this seriously!”
You understand that the family is on his back, but all you can think about is getting on with the case at hand. There’s no way you can do any more than you’re currently doing. And at the end of the day, everyone’s end goal is a resolution, regardless of where they are in the chain. “Please tell the family we’ll update them later, I appreciate that everyone is stressed, but I really need to get on so I can get this resolved as soon as possible,” you reply. Every second counts. The police officer sighs heavily. “I’ll call you in an hour, and you’d better have an ETA by then!” He hangs up.
The above scenario can be applied to many different areas and roles within the web industry. Whether it’s a coding issue, a hardware problem, a system or network behaving strangely, an essential third party supplier having problems, or one of numerous other things, it often leads to the same question from customers: ‘What’s the ETA for a fix?’
It’s a legitimate question, but one which is difficult to answer, and gets more impossible the more complex the problem is. It could be fixed in the next two minutes. Or the next hour. But 99% of the time it’s impossible to say until it’s actually resolved (and by then all anyone cares about is that it’s fixed).
You don’t want to pluck a number out of the air because it’s almost definitely going to be entirely wrong. You don’t want to mislead your customers. You also want to communicate that you’re doing everything within your power – and usually lots of other people’s power, too – to reach a satisfactory resolution quickly. But this is often difficult to get across, particularly when emotions are running high. You don’t want to interrupt the ‘investigators’, because you know it will delay progression and put even more pressure on an already difficult situation, but it’s also challenging and stressful to have unhappy customers.
So what’s the answer? If we knew, we’d probably be trillionaires. But there are ways to mitigate the situation, and to mitigate the situation for customers, and customers’ customers, and so on down the chain, by remembering the following:
1. Keeping calm is the most productive thing you can do right now
Everyone involved in the situation is doing the best they can, and working as hard as they can. It’s already a high pressure situation, and getting angry or upset doesn’t resolve anything any more quickly; in fact, it tends to create more problems. Trust us, we know!
A linked issue here is feeling helpless. Just take a minute away from your screen and your phone to take a deep breath and do something you enjoy or that will distract, for example making a coffee, creating a playlist, or stretching your legs.
2. Everyone’s in the same boat
No one wants anyone to be unhappy, and everyone is wholeheartedly after the same outcome: a fast, practical resolution. Everyone cares just as much as you do, if not more. Issues aren’t fun for anyone anywhere in the chain, and they cost everyone time and money. We hate you being stressed, your customers being stressed, and our teams being stressed. It’s not a situation we ever prolong in any way, and we utilise maximum resources to make sure issues are resolved as quickly as possible. Check out What happens during downtime? for more information.
3. No news is good news
It means that people are busy investigating and resolving an issue. Although everyone’s first instinct is to ask for updates, the best thing we can do to ensure issues are solved as quickly as possible is to let the administrators and engineers get on with it. We struggle to step back from doing that too, because it’s only natural, but we do our best.
Finally, we’d like to reiterate that every member of staff involved is a hundred per cent dedicated to resolving any issues that occur. We’re incredibly lucky to work in a company that has no blame culture, a lot of trust, and where every single person has an incredibly strong work ethic. This allows us to resolve issues as quickly and effectively as they can be resolved, and we’re committed to providing you with the service you and your customers deserve.
As much as i understand the point of this post – your large amount of downtime and while you try to fix it people are complaining to you.
However the example you provide is really not the case.
Lets change the scenario – there was a murder, then another murder, then another murder, then a mass murder, then another violent murder… By the time of the latest murder do you not imagine the public, police chief, boss will be expecting something to be done? They are not expecting you to prevent all murders ever – they just want you to reduce the amount of murders, or provide solutions/measures to reduce the impact of it proactively.
People would be far less irritable if the number and frequency of these occurences were back to the good old days.
Shame the founding and orginal directors have left the company now.
It’s an interesting addition to the analogy Neil. What you’ve proposed introduces two potential scenarios here:
1) The murders are being resolved each time, and every case is separate. However, there’s a public outcry at the overall increase in murders (this fits your statement ‘they just want you to reduce the amount of murders…’ etc.).
2) The murders are all the result of the same serial killer, and the investigators haven’t put the murderer behind bars so the problem is reoccurring (we know this isn’t true because there are always far too many different factors at hand: DDoS attacks, third party issues such as ISP connectivity, hardware problems, network issues, and so on).
Taking the first scenario, since it fits the situation more accurately for the purposes of this analogy, the service the investigators are providing hasn’t changed. If anything, the increase in murders requires more work to keep on top of, whilst the resources they have are still the same. Effectively, the public is blaming the investigators for causing the murders, which is extremely unlikely to ever be the case, particularly if criminals continue to be put behind bars (i.e. issues are resolved, albeit sometimes in the short term).
Regardless, in our scenario, it’s not really who’s causing the murders that’s relevant, but rather what exactly is increasing their numbers that everyone cares about. So then we get to the root of the issue: how do you stop the murders occurring in the first place? Underpinning both these scenarios is the very fact that murderers will be a problem for as long as the human race exists; comparable to the fact that just as technology exists, it has the capacity to fail (whether this is induced by people, platforms, technology, etc. etc.). As you point out in your comment, ‘They are not expecting you to prevent all murders ever – they just want you to reduce the amount…or provide solutions/measures to reduce the impact of it proactively.’
As it stands, the investigators are being held responsible when they’re already unexpectedly working at full, if not more than full, capacity. They have a huge additional task of locating potential causes, of which there could be dozens, or hundreds. This becomes even more complex when you consider the fact that multiple factors can work in different combinations and may not be instantly obvious.
For example, you may spend a lot of time researching local prison security, when it turns out that actually it’s much more important to find out that the area has recently passed a law to allow bars to open later, and as a result there are more alcohol-induced brawls. Basically, there are a lot of avenues to investigate at all levels and stages, and the bigger your city grows, the more the number of factors – and potential culprits – increase, along with their potential combinations. The reality is that we’re also dealing with some pretty huge additional considerations (including moving to a different data centre, which is pretty much beyond this comparison!) which have added more ingredients to the mix.
Going back to the analogy, as a result, you’d expect that the murder rate would increase temporarily, then even out, and then begin to reduce, which is exactly what happened. However, you then have the possibility that a random serial killer goes on an individual rampage soon after. Even though the investigators know it’s an isolated incident, the public doesn’t see it as such, and they associate it with events that happened weeks or months previously and jump to all kinds of conclusions – a rational reaction, but with inaccurate responses. At this point, because there are generalisations because the public sees it all as one consecutive problem rather than individual incidents with separate causes, you’re basically suffering the consequences of people reacting as if a whole new spate of huge murders suddenly occurred, when in fact it’s an anomaly with really bad timing.
At the risk of this turning into a whole blog post on its own – and flogging this analogy to death (excuse the pun!) – in conclusion, although everyone would like everything to be solved immediately and stay solved, that can never be the nature of the beast. So in many ways it’s never going to satisfy the public’s expectations, and that’s true of any business in this industry. What’s really important is that the factors we do have control over we keep control over, and at the consistently high level that our legacy and reputation have been built on. All I can say is that, like the investigator in the original blog post, we’re doing the best we can to resolve things both in the long term and short term.
Actually, as a Heart customer for the past five years I can say hand on heart (geddit) that this is the most patronising tosh I’ve seen for a long time.
We’ve seen quality, performance and uptime take a dive in the last few months, and when I contacted support about a security issue I got a sarcastic and downright rude response from support ‘we’re sorry our kit is only eight months old’.
Only a few months ago Heart’s chief operating officer was on here promising things would change and you’d be more open and just generally better and nothing has changed.
I’ll be surprised if you publish this at all because we all know you like to shut people up if they have ‘negative’ things to say(see Heart reseller conference, where I understand people had to Tweet questions rather than ask from the floor) , but if you do please don’t respond with yet more PR waffle.
Hi Patrick,
You’re entitled to your own opinion; apologies as it wasn’t ever intended to be interpreted in that way. If you read my response to Neil, that covers the aspect of people chaining unrelated events together. The last period of downtime was in September, affected a tiny minority of customers, and yet the response is, ‘everything’s going down and constantly getting worse’, which isn’t the case. It’s an unfortunate aspect of having two issues that occurred within three months of each other. Having said that, we are being proactive about it, we have a team working on the issues affecting these specific servers with a view to developing long-term high performance and stability in line with our typical high standards. As the post and my comment illustrate, not everything is instantly and permanently resolved, as much as everyone who’s ever worked in any aspect of the technology industry wishes it were.
I’m sorry you are unhappy with the response from our support team. If you would like to provide the support ticket number, I will see it is escalated for our head of customer services to investigate.
With regards to HeartCon, we asked people to tweet questions because that was how they entered the competition to win a Mac Pro. It also allowed us to collate all the questions afterwards to make sure we answered them and/or they got passed to the right department or added to projects as needed. If anything, Twitter is a lot more of a public way to invite questions, since everything was viewable globally, by both social media and video. We always intended to invite questions from the floor but unfortunately we didn’t have the time as there were so many Twitter questions. However, we did have an open floor question session after every talk, including Craig’s keynote, which covered the issues, and we also chatted freely to people at the after event on whatever topics they wanted to discuss. Craig also encouraged people to personally ask him questions and express their concerns throughout the day and evening, and as far as I’m aware everyone who spoke to him (or any of us) was satisfied that their voice was heard. In fact, we had several people tell us to stop talking about it (!)
I hope that clears a few things up; whatever we do, it’s always done with the best intentions, and really that’s what this post is trying to say.