I wasn't responding to get into an argument with you. You are obviously
free to do whatever you want, and handle your customers however you see
fit. I was simply explaining from my perspective what I am seeing today,
and what I saw while building Microserv. You remember, the company that
was 10x larger than yours and sold to JAB for more, per sub, than any
other company so far. :)
I also own part of the fastest growing software companies in Utah. We
have 20+ full-time developers and current customers like Nike, Google,
eBay, Nordstroms, Toms, Disney and Vistaprint to name a few. The company
has been in business for less than a year and already has a valuation of
$6,000,000 from a national institutional investor that invested a month
ago. I'm pretty familiar with the software development scene, especially
in Utah. :)
Good luck with your app, I hope it works out for you.
Travis
On 11/20/2014 2:19 PM, Sterling Jacobson via Af wrote:
Wrong on both counts.
I used to be in software development, so like anything else, it's who you know.
I can get this done for a lot less.
And having an app for the customer to view and fix or find problems on their
own is a differentiator itself.
Every one of my customers I've talked to about this has expressed great
interest in not having to call in if they can help it.
I'm guessing a few of the older generation won't have a phone or care to use an
app, they can always call in.
But in general it looks like it will greatly reduce support overhead for the
ISP and increase customer satisfaction at the same time.
I guess time will tell.
I already have this underway, parts are developed already, but if someone wants
to help out, let me know!
-----Original Message-----
From: Af [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Travis Johnson via Af
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 2:15 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's
Sterling,
This sounds like an easy task, but I can tell you as someone that is currently
developing software, and is starting December 1 to build a simple iPhone app,
software development is very expensive. My app is a pretty simple... easy to
use front-end with a cloud based database back-end... yet the quotes I have
gotten are $50,000 - $75,000. This is from 3 different development companies
all based in Utah. All of them are busy and each has 20+ full-time developers
working for them, so they have enough business and must not be totally out of
line on their quotes.
I said this 10+ years ago, and I'll say it again... customer service is the
only thing that makes you different than the big cable and telco companies.
Having a live person that can help people troubleshoot and fix issues is the
key to keeping people with your service. If you are just going to send them to
an app on their phones, you become the same as every other provider... and your
service becomes a commodity just like everyone else.
Travis
On 11/20/2014 1:49 PM, Sterling Jacobson via Af wrote:
BUT, the phones now days are smart enough to know when wifi sucks or goes out
completely.
They fall back to 3/4G.
Which is awesome, because it could still talk to the service provider end and
tell the customer the status.
I think this would work better than a green/red light.
The phone App would tell you that your service is correct to the house, but
that inside it's not talking.
Then walk the customer through a set of standard fix it routines.
That would solve most of our calls right there.
On the back end it just needs to talk to a server process that can get access
to the device on the side of the house.
The best would be an embedded speed test in the ONT/CPE that could report back
to the App and say they are getting what they are paying for to the side of
their house. And then give them suggestions for fixing their crappy wifi.
I bet it wouldn't take much to get this done and working with a few larger
billing systems and equipment platforms, who's with me??
-----Original Message-----
From: Af [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Ken Hohhof via Af
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 12:35 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's
Part of the problem is so many customers are 100% WiFi now, so unless you have
a managed router there, you have 2 big problem areas beyond the demarc - the
customer's router and the customer's WiFi.
-----Original Message-----
From: Bill Prince via Af
Sent: Thursday, November 20, 2014 1:04 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's
Linktechs built a tool a couple years ago that ran on the customer's PC (WIndows only)
that would give the customer a "connection health"
indication. It would monitor the local gateway, and give both a green light
for connected, plus a reading on the latency. You go too much beyond that, and
you will get a bunch of false positives when something beyond your local
network is having some kind of issue (we get our share of these).
I don't think they got much response from it, and I don't think they offer it
any longer.
bp
<part-15@SkylineBroadbandService>
On 11/20/2014 9:43 AM, Sterling Jacobson via Af wrote:
What I really want is an integrated system that isn't stuck in the 90's.
I want the customer to have an app on their phone that tells them
when their network is having issues and why.
I want it to also remind them to pay their bill and provide a
lazy/easy way to do that.
I want that same system to have an engineer app that tells us when
nodes fail and why.
So if a node goes down and it's important, it should show up on my
phone and I can take action.
One of those actions would be to message to outage impacted customers
the ETA to fix etc.
Emails from Cacti don't count.
