June 28th, 2011 evanced
Thanks to all that stopped by to visit with us at ALA. It is always great to see so many of you in person. We felt that it a was a great conference especially being able to share the story of our new family merger with Demco. Our whole team got to spend time with them and get to know them more. We walked away feeling even that much better about our decision and our new team/family.
Interest in the BranchAnywhere machine was once again high. Lots of libraries seem to be ready to now explore investments in this idea with machines for their communities.
Where will you put yours?
Thanks again and we hope that everyone has a great 2nd half of 2011.
Thanks
Rob Cullin
June 22nd, 2011 evanced
I’m a big believer that when you mess up you look the problem and those that you failed straight in the eye and say it, “I’m sorry”. I really am. We’ve not met your or especially our own expectations for support in the last 8-10 weeks. We’ve gotten behind and though we’ve worked very hard to dig out (and we are making progress), we still aren’t back to the response speed we expect to be at. Please know that we are working very hard to fix it, we don’t feel it’s acceptable, and we will get better as soon as possible, and we will do a better job of avoiding this performance slowdown in the future.
Some facts about how we got behind:
- It is NOT because of the Demco acquisition. Demco has not been active in any of our staffing or planning decision to this point. We simply underestimated (on our own) how much increase in support the Summer Reader product would require this year. There is no one to blame but ourselves.
- Every spring/summer we face this tidal wave of increased support. Support cases more than triple for about 4 months March, April, May, and June. The other 8 months are pretty steady at about a 1/3 to a 1/4 that number of cases. We try to plan and prepare for it, but the increase this year was far higher in numbers and complexities than we ever expected.
- Unfortunately we cannot afford to staff up year round to match that capacity need for just 4 months. It would significantly increase the costs of the software to you if we did.
- We added 3 Full Time people to try and help address this increase but it wasn’t enough, plus we compounded the problem by not starting them soon enough. We’ll learn from that and get a better scaled team, started earlier, with a better training game plan in place.
- We recognize that the growth in support has also exceed the capabilities of our systems (phones, ticketing system, triaging processes, etc.) We are working on upgrading all of those to better help us manage the huge increase March – June. Those will be in place by next spring.
- In the meantime we’ve authorized overtime for our support members to try and deal with the surge as much as possible. The good news is historically the surge in support drops off dramatically around the end of June so the worst is over, and we hope to get back to our normal less than 1 day response times very soon.
- We have made it a mission to make the phone support system much better than it is or ever has been. When we were smaller, call volumes were light, support volumes were much lower, our current model worked pretty well. Things are different, we are bigger, the support volume has increased to a point where we need a better process and systems to support that. We are working on that issue and we will have it in place ahead of next year’s Summer Reader surge.
- We are also working on plans to try and simplify the software so it doesn’t need as much support. We are working some big plans in that regard and will let you know more once we get things in line.
Todd and I along with most of our sales and support team will be at ALA later this week in booth #2239. We are in our own booth but adjacent to our new parent company Demco. We’d love for you to come by and chat with us if you are coming to ALA. I know we’ve let some of you down but know that we will do better. If you aren’t going to ALA and would like to talk to us about what you think we need to do to get better drop us a line: http://evancedsolutions.com/contact-us/ and we’ll get back with you after ALA.
We appreciate all of you as our customers. We really do want to make you happy, provide you great software, and even better service. Help us learn from this bump in the road and emerge from this a better company for you.
We are very sorry.
Thank you,
Rob Cullin
Chief Sales and Marketing Officer
Co-Founder
June 17th, 2011 Christine
Perhaps that sounded a bit more bossy than it should have. We highly recommend FireSign digital signage solutions, created by a Nashville-based company called Anode. FireSign is easy to use and even has a handy feature called EventConnector. Event Connector was built specifically for our Events product and helps your staff quickly integrate Events and your digital signage.
We’ve become big fans of FireSign and Anode. The product is easy to use, their staff understands what libraries need, they strive to provide great customer service, and they are just plain fun folks.
Interested in learning more? They have two upcoming webinars happening on June 22 and July 13 – you can learn more about them on their website: http://www.firesign.net.
They will also be at ALA Annual Conference – Booth 3623. We’ll be in Booth 2239 and we’ll also be featuring a FireSign touchscreen.
Don’t forget to follow us during conference here on the blog. We’ll also be posting on Facebook and Twitter.
