“System Status” – Keeping you informed

This is my first post as the Customer Support Manager (and certainly not my last). As Ben will have mentioned in his last blog article, I have been with the company for just over 2 years now. I began life at LCN in first line support, having already had experience in an I.T background. I am very passionate about both my work and the company. It soon occurred to me that in order for any company to grow and survive, you must listen to your customers – and understand their concerns. My drive for customer care and quality of information was rewarded with a promotion to Support Team Leader. With my ever constant drive for customer satisfaction, I became Customer Support Manager (only quite recently) and have continued to push these qualities. I now instill my own benchmark of quality and customer satisfaction on the staff that provide your first line support.

For my first blog article, I would like to discuss one of the most useful, but under-utilised methods of communication we have for customer notifications, the System Status. Noticeboards have long been used by I.T. Companies to relay messages, or system changes to members of the public or client bases. Our very own System Status page is no different.

What is it, and how do I find it?

http://www.lcn.com/announcements

The system status is one of the fastest and most efficient ways of keeping informed with server statuses – whether it is scheduled maintenance, or perhaps even a service issue!

We incorporate both a visual traffic light system (green, amber and red), and a text box for more in depth explanations to issues. In the instances of high traffic, or server-wide changes, you may find that everyone tends to call the support line to find out the latest information – or to just know what is going on. You can stay equally informed by simply visiting the system status page! It is regularly updated, and new information is sent to the board.

We relay the majority of system or hosting information in relation to I.P. Addresses. An I.P. Address will identify a particular server that we are relating certain issues to. As we provide shared hosting solutions, scheduled maintenance (even unforeseen errors) can affect multiple users at any given time. This is mainly the reason why you will not see a whole list of I.P addresses listed, for each individual website that is affected. You will normally only see one, as it is likely that all those customers are on the same server.

How to find out if you are on a particular affected server?

A very handy website you can use to find out I.P. Address information is provided below:

http://ip-lookup.net/domain-lookup.php

To see if your domain might be associated to a certain system status, simply enter your domain name (including the www part) in the ‘domain lookup’ section.

An example domain name to type in would be: www.lcn.com

Upon submitting your website address, you should be presented with an I.P. Address result. For the example we used of www.lcn.com, our I.P. Address is: 94.126.40.226

I certainly hope you have found the above information helpful and I welcome any and all feedback concerning the use of our System Status board.