Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Getting ahead of the Customer Experience Perception Case

I have read several articles on how users are the alarm of prevalence in many environments. How we should be looking at customer experience.

This is so true and appropo. If you are truly looking to provide customer service, the customer experience should be at the forefront of your service philosophy.

Why?

In the beginning,  help desk staff listened for a call.  They waited on the phone to ring.  In fact, in some (MANY!) environments, they still do.  They also use the Call routing information to determine if there is a problem in a specific area, neighborhood, or part of the infrastructure.  Wild huh?  If your NOC is using call statistics to do correlation, you are definitely managing alarms and alerts in the user perception space.

Even in many modern day Operations centers, Operations operates in a mode of being purely reactive to incoming events.  Furthermore, in cases where the inputs overwhelm the staff's ability to discern real problems and prioritize them as time evolves,you see people that will wait for the loudest problem to surface with incoming calls.

If your layer 1 support is doing dispatch only,in almost all cases, you are operating in a purely reactive environment.

If you only allow events to be presented that are predefined and actionable, you are simulated that phone call in software. Same thing,different media.

User Perception Window

It is the time interval from when the customer is affected to the time it gets too painful to go on without reporting the problem.

In some environments, this can be hours. Especially if the end user has not seen results from previous service outages.  Or they have had negative experiences in calling in problems.  Some will commence to doing their own troubleshooting like rebooting everything.  Some will merely wait, go take a break, or go to lunch in hopes that the problem heals or gets fixed.

When folks transition from in house support to an outsourced arrangement, one of the factors that is common is the need for better support.  More responsiveness.  Better up time. Better awareness.

In some instances, the time has become so critical, end users will introduce problems just to test and see how long it takes for the managed services provider to respond.   This results in a very short window and usually fares badly for the Service provider.

Negative perceptions by your customers have a negative effect on your Net Promoter Scores and can be the most prevalent cause of customer churn. They affect the effectiveness of the support organization.  And the ability to generate new revenue.

Architecture

Most management architectures are designed wrong for the ability to migrate towards a proactive management stance.   If you are waiting on Traps and syslog events, you are also waiting on the phone to ring.  While this is cheap and easy, it carries with it the consequences of always being after the fact, always post-cognitive.

And the problem is profoundly exacerbated by the introduction of agility in the enterprise.  The migration towards constant updates, infrastructure movement and redefinition, migration of applications across cloud platforms and containers, even off premise.

Consider this - changes in the environment can happen ANYWHERE in the Green, Red, or Yellow zones.  In effect, a change can lead up to an event horizon, cause other effects after the event horizon, or change the effects by changing in the middle of a problem.

If your architecture only looks at the red and yellow zones, you can never get AHEAD of the User Perception Window.  You can get a better handle on how you handle problems, identification and prioritization of problems, even building better workflow and run book processes.

How Do You Get There?

In many cases,architects and management has chosen the path of least resistance in hopes that enterprise management as a technology, is a commodity. (Funny - This was a marketing ploy by wares vendors to circumvent having to compete!)

Interesting thing about getting ahead of the customer is that this is the hard part.  It is the part where you have to go through the data, the workflow, the results, and come up with solutions to designing and implementing around architectural and product shortcomings, improving the processes and automations, and building and putting in place more effective instrumentation.

I'd like to warn you up front - if you're not willing to commit to the challenge, its better to admit that you will never get ahead of the customer experience perceptron.  Maybe you can set expectations with customers. Maybe you can put some spin on it.

There are several, very important Continuous Process Improvement sorts of tasks that need to be undertaken.  These include:

1. Post Mortems.


What was the root cause of the problem?  Was there more than a single cause?
Did the organization mishandle the problem?
Were there things that could have made the problem correction, better?
Are the runbooks and processes in order?
Has redundancy, DR, and HA been addressed properly?

A post mortem analysis is imperative to go through and analyze the what happened and how the support organization responded.  You need the data to be able to benchmark how information was derived and things were accomplished from the start to finish.

2. Failure Analysis


In the course of time, periodically, you need to go through your tickets and look for hardware and software that has failed over the reporting period.  Look for patterns and inconsistencies in the products, services, and systems.

An important gauge is to come up with a way of providing a cost of maintenance per device / Device type / Application.  Analyze both Scheduled and unscheduled maintenance actions.   This gives you an EXCELLENT way of illuminating problem areas in a way that non-technical people understand - dollars and cents.  Doesn't have to be real but relative and relevant.

Many Operations environments actually inflict a lot of pain on themselves by not doing failure analysis. You need to be ahead of the curve of equipments, systems, and software that fails more and more,takes more time to maintain, and causes more downtime.

3. Instrumentation


In the course of getting ahead of the customer perception window, you have to advance the instrument to seek out and illuminate issues before user perception is realized. If you are not increasing the instrumentation to be more predictive, you can not ever be able to visualize before the event horizon.

With containerization and microarchitectures, you need to build in advanced monitoring capabilities.  In fact, this advanced precognitive monitoring needs to be an integral part of the microarchitecture.

If you are not fielding advanced correlation where you are ACTIVELY looking for pre-cognitive conditions - conditions that lead up to a potential failure, you will NEVER EVER get in front of the customer.  If you are still waiting on a trap, a syslog event, or even a timed threshold, you are tragically on the wrong side of the timeline.

You need to look at user transactions from the user perspective. a 3 second deviation,while not discernable to many, could yield huge insight into an oncoming disaster.

What about IPFIX / Netflow data? What can you discern from this data to yield insights? Can you instrument the patterns into software to turn it into something to alert on?

4.  Adaptive Analytics


You need to be able to sample through the combinations of configurations and analyze event streams, instrumentation, and workflow data to look for predictive patterns that point to a customer experience potential problem BEFORE the event horizon occurs.

What things happened to illuminate an pending event horizon?

Can you discern loading conditions and thresholds from you analytics?

Linear regression? By time intervals?  Related or not related. Causal or not?

Summary


While out of the box Enterprise Management applications say they are proactive, take a good look at where they function in the Customer perspective perceptron space.  Could be, they are proactive after the customer perceptron.

Until you instrument and threshold on things that are before the customer perception window,

YOU CANNOT GET AHEAD OF THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE.  

In the comments, I'd be interested in hearing how your product / service fits in the Customer Perception window.  Leave a comment!


Saturday, September 12, 2015

To Build Versus Buy

Over the course of time that Management systems have evolved - at least in my years of exposure - there seems to always be the question - Build vs. Buy.

I have been in 3 different scenarios that show different perspectives as to where these views come from.  These perspectives include:

  • Product Company
  • Integrator
  • End User

 Product Perspective


From a product perspective, many tend to believe that the product is close enough to the 80% rule that the question of build versus buy should never come up.  In fact, some believe strongly enough to count the end user out as eccentric or lacking. Or they are intimidated by the Integrator.

I always liked the possibilities I could bring about with Log Matrix NerveCenter.  And the functions I put into the menus of HP OpenView.

Some products painted themselves in a corner. Like Netcool OMNIbus.  When they aligned to Telco oriented standards, they mandated to problems outside of the telco realm had to adapt to the Telco standards.   For example, color coding of Severity. But then again, not everything has a real severity or conforms so much to event management.

Some product companies are skeptical and somewhat intimidated by premier Integrators.  Instead of listening to the requirements and approaches, then embracing change, they will shun it.

As an Integrator, I was avoided, patronized, and shunned.  A few select product companies embraced my approaches.

As an end user, product companies seemed a bit taken aback when I told them their product doesn't scale.  Or doesn't fit.  Sometimes to the point of having their lawyers call me (Kinda weird).  And I've seen Sales folks do all sorts of things in lieu of fixing the technical issues.  Like a visit to your VP.  Or a talk with your CEO.  You know you've been sandbagged when your VP comes in with a bunch of glossies and tells you to evaluate this or that.

Integrator


As an Integrator, products are viewed as something they can use to deliver a value add. While there are a lot of Integrators that prefer to just do installation and setup, the premier Integrators are always looking for products that create a difference.  That segregates them from others.

From an Integrator perspective, I always strived to achieve success for both my team and my customer.  Sometimes, that takes a bit of work. And some thinking out of the box.

Sometimes, it was with a product and its capabilities.  Other times, I did my own code.

In the industry, there are a few folks out there that take products out of the box, put some code around them to integrate with other products or to add capabilities, and sell that and services around the extended capabilities and services.   Product companies don't always know how to leverage these folks or even consider them viable.

End User


From an end user perspective, some products just don't scale enough to make it.  Or they lack critical capabilities. And yes, price can be a factor.

I've been in places that could not use commercial products without significant work to make it work. For example, I know of a place that had 8 separate and distinct eHealth instances. And they ended up with 8 people supporting the product.

In instances where Build has evolved into a viable option, cost, capabilities, and scalability are the primary reasons.

In the immortal words of Larry Wall -- "There's more than one way to do it!".  Product companies don't have a stranglehold on innovation.  In many cases, quite the opposite is true. Its hard to do something different if the product does 50% or less of what the requirement is if it means refactoring and redeveloping code.  In fact, many developers consider that the product is done once coded.  Of the ones that have evolved, you see a lot of refactoring and reworking to achieve more capabilities and scale.

In Summary... EMBRACE the Innovator.


Product Companies - Use these Innovators to expand horizons, empower repeatable integrations, and drive solutions over tools.

Integrators - Want to get to the next level? Get you some Innovators and start productizing your Value Add.

End Users - Use Innovators to work through problems and get to solutions.  Tools aren't much it they don't fit your organization form and function and its workflow.  Innovators do that.  Embrace innovations that enhance your business in meaningful and distinctive ways. Keep driving efficiency and customer satisfaction up.