As we became more familiar with the iPad, we started seeing a few key areas where SoftLayer Mobile could benefit from the large format iPad user interface. We’ve been able to incorporate a phenomenal feature set in the SoftLayer Mobile application, and as our desired feature set has become more and more complete, we’ve gotten a bit of breathing room from our iPhone releases. We used that breathing room to re-visit the iPad and what it could mean for the SoftLayer Mobile customer experience on a tablet. The result of that investigation is the SoftLayer Mobile HD application:

As you might expect, SoftLayer Mobile HD shares quite a bit of functionality with its iPhone sibling. The application offers a window into your SoftLayer environment so that you can browse, create and edit support tickets; discover information about computing resources and bandwidth; and keep up-to-date on the latest notifications from our data centers. The iPad application also helps you keep track of financial information by allowing you to browse your account and its invoices. All this functionality benefits from the intuitive interface of the iPad. You have more room to browse, more room to edit, and fewer screens to navigate as you manage and explore your virtual SoftLayer data center.

Best of all: The application is only in its first release, and already shows great promise! We have plenty of room to grow and tons of ideas about the next features and functions we want to add. If you’re iPad-equipped, get the SoftLayer Mobile HD application in the iTunes App Store. When you’re navigating through the interface, take note of anything you’d like to see us change or add, and let us know!

-Scott

SoftLayer customers were given two internal tickets notifying them if they were to be affected, and when those tickets were created, the ticket system would have then sent an email to the admin user on that account. Additionally, our portal notification system was updated to show details about the window, and we created new threads in our customer forums to provide regular, centralized updates. We went as far as taking a few calls and meetings with customers to talk about their concerns with the maintenance timing and length because we know that any downtime is bad downtime in the world of hosting.

Saturday night, we had extra support on staff online, and our social media ninja was awake and letting the world know step by step what we were doing with real time status alerts. We wanted to be extremely transparent during the entire process. This was not a maintenance we could avoid, and we tried to roll as many different things that needed work into this maintenance without making a roll back impossible.

The maintenance itself went well, and as planned, most items that were taken down were back online well before the window ended. We ran into a few snags in bringing all of the CloudLayer CCIs back online, but even with those delays for a few customers, the work was completed by the time we committed to.

Now for the customer experience aspect. From reading various tweets from our customers, it seems like we should/could have done a few things even better: Been more proactive, sent standard email, attempted phone calls, etc.

While some of these options may be considered, not all are feasible. If you are one of the customers that tweeted, has blogged, is planning on tweeting, is planning on blogging or believes we’re being anything less than genuine and transparent on our social media platforms, I want to hear from you.

Please comment on this blog, tweet me @skinman454, email me skinman@softlayer.com, call me at 214.442.0592, come by our office and visit.

Whatever it takes, just contact me. I can’t put myself in your shoes and feel your pain on things like this unless we have a chance to talk about it. I look forward to our conversation.

-Skinman

Speaking of time flying, I’ve been at SoftLayer for three and a half years now. I was hired as Customer Service Manager and immediately started looking at ways to help our customers love us even more. I found some notes that I scribbled after my second week here and I notice some pretty interesting goals. Here are a few that I was able to decipher … some we knocked out of the park, some that are continuous efforts and some that we can still implement:

Completed:

• Implement ticket rating and survey to monitor and track support quality
• Build an on-boarding process to help new customers in their first 48 hours
• Streamline the cancellation process

Continuous Processes:

• Make sure current customers know they are more important than potential customers
• Teach our customers about our processes and procedures

To Be Completed:

• Include a link on the website and in the portal to get immediate feedback from customers
• Start using webinars to answer customer questions and share technical tutorials
• Create a customer advisory board to consult as we make business decisions about things like market expansions and new product releases

What does that mean? We still have ways to make our business even better for SoftLayer customers.

Enter my renewed focus: Customer Experience. In the next few weeks, I’ll be talking to internal groups and customers alike to find ways that we can improve our service, products, automation … and everything else for that matter. These discussions will involve every department in the company, so all is fair game.

Over the course of the next few months, we’ll share a few of the things we hear and what we think we can do to continue to improve the SoftLayer customer experience.

The main goal is to find the perfect way to incorporate the 4 areas above and others into our daily lives. I have a few ideas now like; the link on the website, ways to teach our customers, marketing and sales and the webinars, and we are well on our way to having customer advisory boards and user group meetings. If you have ideas, I will appreciate anything you have to offer.

-Skinman