I really question if customers want a device to help them troubleshoot. More
like if we (a bunch of network admins) were the customer, that’s what we’d
want. It’s like the guys on Big Bang Theory trying to imagine what a regular
person would want.
The hurdle seems to be getting them to pay someone to fix problems in their
internal network. If you can monetize this by selling an onsite support plan,
or by dispatching from a separate side of your business that charges for
service calls, that is good, as long as you can say this is not an Internet
service problem, it is a customer network problem. Otherwise, refer them to a
local computer shop that does house calls.
What amazes me is the reluctance to pay us $5/mo for a managed Mikrotik router
that comes with free replacement, phone support and onsite support. All of a
sudden it’s not so interesting to have us solve the problem for them. Yet they
will go to Best Buy and let the kid talk them into a $200 Linksys AC router as
the solution to all their problems. I guess that points back to me being a
poor salesman compared to the kid at Best Buy. Probably because I know the
managed router is a good deal for the customer, so if they don’t want it, I’m
only going to push it so hard. While Best Buy makes tons more money on a $200
router than they do on a $50 router and doesn’t give a rat’s ass what’s good
for the customer, so they sell the hell out of the expensive router. And
people like going to stores and buying cool gadgets. Maybe I need to rub some
“new car smell” on the Mikrotik routers or something.
So I guess if your proposed gizmo has a “new car smell” or “latest iPhone” aura
to it, people might buy it. Just make sure that red light doesn’t have false
detects, or it will just make people complain their Internet is down because
the red light is on.
From: David via Af
Sent: Friday, November 21, 2014 9:27 AM
To: af@afmug.com
Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Network Monitoring in the 2010's
Yeah we put a little thought into ours on that behalf.
The customer will have to go to the trouble of signing up for these alerts and
it will only show alerts associated with their tower or CPE.
Even any scheduled work being done on that site.
Alerts for outages on their connection only is all that will be displayed.
We are not doing this for anyone on our FSK network only the 450 net.
We already have the Portal for billing.
On 11/20/2014 11:47 AM, Josh Luthman via Af wrote:
*An app for my phone? Yuck
*Something that pushes to cutomers letting them know we're having issues?
Yuck
*Something that let's the customer verify their particular service is
good/not? That'd be great!
*Web portal for billing, easy peasy
Why a node fails probably won't be detectable by a machine - in some cases
it's difficult for a person to narrow it down (radio, connectors, cables,
ethernet, surge, etc) but I'd like to see ideas on this of course.
I use/suggest an outgoing message. IF the customer is having issues and they
do call us, they hear we're having issues and hang up. This means that we're
not telling 100 people there are issues when 25 are effecting ending up with 75
calls next month saying we owe them a credit when they had nothing to do with
an outage.
Josh Luthman
Office: 937-552-2340
Direct: 937-552-2343
1100 Wayne St
Suite 1337
Troy, OH 45373
On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 12:43 PM, Sterling Jacobson via Af <af@afmug.com>
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.
