As you may have read in this space before, I am a refugee of the music business.  If you read the title of this blog, you may also have some idea of where this is going…  You see, I view the traditional “break fix” method of IT support as a perfect parallel to the “record business” of the eighties.  Back in those halcyon days, the record business could do no wrong.  They were busy slappin’ themselves on the back for forcing everyone to toss out their old recordings and replace them with new “perfect sound forever” CD’s.  With no end in sight to windfall profits, the music business relied, for the most part, on promoting people straight through the “Peter Principle” to what use to be in the seventies called “God’s way of sayin’ you make too much money”.  These unqualified “business men” spent their days largely congratulating each other on their marketing genius while attending “listening” (read: eating and drinking) parties at the expense of the artist (yep, promotional costs are taken out of the artist royalties).  Or, worse yet, selling “advertising”, uncut (new, and returnable), no royalty CD’s under the table for a 50% discount off of the wholesale price to retailers.  The discs were intended to offset advertising cost for the retailer to promote a particular artist (the cost of manufacturing charged back to the artist), but were instead sold by the retailers for a higher margin, or returned to the manufacturer for the full wholesale price (unbelievably, DEDUCTING the royalties for the artist against their “sales”).  Sadly, I personally witnessed the later on a scale of skids per week.  Then came the nineties and the oughts…  Competition from other entertainment options, hubris and new technology alternatives for the artists rendered the music business un-recognizable.   Now, clearly, this is an extreme example.  Not, in my opinion, too far off the current state of IT support, though.*  Now, it turns out, it is more efficient to provide IT support remotely than it is in house (more than 90 percent of IT problems can be found, diagnosed and fixed remotely).  Guess who the last people in the world are who are going to tell you this…  That’s right, the guys who are profiting from their own inefficiency.  As in the record business, the current break fix model relies on static as opposed to dynamic evolution.  While the IT specialists aren’t wasting your money as obviously as the record weasels of the eighties, they are, in fact, wasting your money.  Sure, like the music business, there are a couple of advantages to having in house support.  There’s a human that you can refer to with a question (kind of like a human “liner note”).  Plus you get that, erm, charming IT attitude.  Wait.  That’s not a positive.  The problem is, just like the music business, the fourth dimension is often being ignored: TIME!  Sellers/providers often assume the customer has plenty of it, and underestimate the relevance of it’s value.  It seems a long way to go, but there you have it:  Keep up or stay out of the way IT service providers.  And pass that mirror this-a-way please (Ha!  Like my heart wouldn’t explode).

* A friend of mine suggested that, indeed, it is not such an extreme example…  Something about driving a city bus where it clearly doesn’t belong on the person of the IT support customer.

Computer hardware, as it turns out, is remarkably reliable stuff.  “Yeah right” I can hear you saying.  “How come I’m always having IT problems?”  Take a look at your invoices for IT support.  See much in the way of hardware?  Nope.  It’s all labor.  And – shocker - it’s less than clear what exactly was done and to what.  Most problems are between one piece of hardware and another, out of date patches/updates, or malicious attacks on unprotected systems. 

Now imagine a world where all of your hardware and software is continually monitored for errors, user errors, patches, updates, licensees and network policy–A system that PROACTIVELY looks for that glitch, patch, or miscreant that’s about to bring your company to it’s knees.  Now, imagine having all this and paying significantly less for it.  Sounds like a sweet world doesn’t it? Certainly better than the $4.00-a-gallon world we’re living in now. 

Enter Office Assurance.  An enterprise that is spending on the order of 100k a year for IT support can cut those costs by 80%.  You may want to re-read that last sentence.  That’s right, EIGHTY big ones.  Now I hear you saying “Tell us, oh Shaman of the computer”…  Look, I’m no Carlos Castaneda and there’s really nothing mystical about it.  Basically, it’s self policing.  Considering computers can only tell the difference between 1’s and 0’s, they truly are remarkable tools.  The fact is, by being a bit clever our remarkable tool can be used to monitor your remarkable tool, for a fraction of the price of doing it manually, AND do it better.  Isn’t that what made computers so desirable in the first place?  Now was that locusts, or frogs?  I can never keep ‘em straight.

PCASSURANCE by DialAGeek is designed to streamline the routine maintenance that is essential in keeping your Windows or Mac-based computers operating as well as the first day you took it out of the box. Besides the obvious spyware and virus threats, all computers accumulate unnecessary and potentially dangerous bits of broken data and extraneous files. Computers – even those that are never online – when “opening” a document or file require the assembling of all sorts of disparate parts. The bigger the file (read: family photos) the wackier. After you’re through fiddling with this particular group of ones and zeros most of the connections are erased. The key word here is MOST. You see, RAM (Random Access Memory) acts as a kind of sorting machine that, due to the complexity of computing, can’t always put back everything the same way it came out. An obvious example of this would be if you make a change to a document. In order to keep track of changes, documents often run in parallel with themselves. In other words, two different files of nearly the same thing exist simultaneously. Without getting all Back to the Future on you, clearly there’s a potential for danger when two things that are one exist (you know, “time space continuum” stuff) at the same time. At any rate, all this whizzing around in time – strike that – assembling and disassembling of data leaves a few bits, here and there, un-accounted for. Quickly, these bits and pieces add up to a slower, and space deprived computer that hardly resembles the one you took out of the box a couple of months ago. This is the stuff that PCASSURANCE sorts out for you on an ongoing basis. In fact, two of the leading contributors to extra bits of data – page memory and temporary memory – are cleaned every four hours. Weekly, the entire disc is inspected for misplaced or extraneous bits of information that are shuffled around or deleted for optimum performance. You don’t want Marty and his siblings completely disappearing from your “memory”, now do you.

Not wanting to give you an entire transcript, I will break this experience down to two sections, positive and negative. We will start with the positive, which unfortunately was only one thing and that would be the person I talked to, his name was Pete. Pete was kind and courteous, most importantly he was attentive and honest. These are key qualities in customer service. At no point did Pete make me feel ignored. He checked back in with me every thirty seconds if he had to put me on hold and tried his best to make sure I was happy. In fact he made such an impression on me that even though my issues were not completely resolved in the end (we will get to that later) I still remember the experience with him to this day.

As I said earlier, the phone call lasted nearly two hours, which in any situation is an hour and fifty minutes too long. In order to get to Pete I had to be transferred three times, having to explain why I was calling to each person I spoke to. As friendly as Pete was, he was insufficiently trained, having to ask someone else how something was done at least three times. It took nearly four hours for my phone to work properly after the call, due to the way their system works, (which in my job can be very inconvenient), so I had to call back from a separate line twice for them to correct the issue, each call taking another twenty minutes out my day. It turns out that the overcharge was due to me having the incorrect plan set up, so understanding that, I had them change it to the right one. However, when I got my phone bill last month the plan still had not been revised, so let’s add another three hundred dollars to my bill. Unfortunately, as great as Pete was, it did not make up for the time, energy and frustration I spent rectifying the situation.

All of us have had experiences like this one; it is the state of almost every call center support department out there. We have all dealt with being passed around from department to department, or my personal favorite “Let me give you the phone number to…….” We tell the same story to thirty people, none of whom passes along the reason why you’re calling to next person you talk to. We all want to call one number, and have the person on the other line listen to what you have to say and help you right there, or worst case, get you to the person who can, and pass along all the necessary information so the matter can be resolved promptly.

As Director of Customer Experience at DialAGeek, it’s my mission to make sure that when you call asking us for help, not only do you have a person like Pete answer the phone, but that person is equipped with all the tools to help you fix your issue promptly and completely, and when you hang up the phone or log off your computer, you walk away with a smile on your face want to tell your friends and family about your positive customer service experience with us.

DialAGeek employs friendly, knowledgeable technicians who are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, either by phone at (800-DIAL-A-GEEK) or online. They even make house calls! And with DialAGeek’s state-of-the-art technology, they can access your computer remotely, see what’s wrong, and fix it while you watch. That means no more sending your computer back to the manufacturer or retailer and waiting for days or weeks to get a problem fixed. Our pay-per-incident service is a great way to get out of a jam when you need to get back online quickly.

DialAGeek also has long-term service plans that are guaranteed to improve your relationship with your computer. The PC Assurance plan cleans out your computer’s system on a regular basis, so you never get bogged down during crunch time. We also offer a backup service that ensures your important files are kept safe. If you’re concerned about identity theft (and who isn’t these days?) our Identity Package protects your personal information so phishers and other criminals come up empty, even if they make it into your computer.

For those of you running a small businesses or office, DialAGeek has Business Services, too. Not only can we fix your IT woes, we have the ability to serve as your company’s system administrator—at a fraction of the cost of hiring a full-time person.

Finally, we know that the holiday season brings plenty of shiny new gadgets into your home. Why spend hours trying to figure them out, or get them to sync up as they’re supposed to? DialAGeek can walk you through it in a user-friendly, non-technical way. You’ll be using your new “toys” like an expert while your neighbor is still reading the manual!

As CEO of DialAGeek, I’m proud of what we’ve built so far, and more is planned for the future. We hope to make your technological life easier in 2008 and beyond.