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Keep up to date with the inner workings at ViaTalk through the company blog. From upcoming features and upgrades, to what were having for lunch, you name it and its probably here.

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Archive for September 2006

Focus: Quality Tech Support

28th Sep 2006

We've been placing a big emphasis internally over the last month or so on improving the customer experience when dealing with our technical support staff. Noone wants to call technical support to begin with, but when they have to the process should be as quick and painless as possible.

Our average hold times a month ago were in the 20+ minute range, including peak and off hours. That number has been reduced to below 8 minutes as a result of our recent staffing changes & revised employee training. Our goal is to always have this number between 5-10 minutes.

posted by The Taskmaster

Uncle Sam

14th Sep 2006

Thanks to good ole' uncle sam, nomadic 911 is a 'feature' of VoIP that is here to stay. Coincidentally, it is a feature that not everyone has decided to offer, and they have done so with little to no repercussion to date, but that is a discussion for a different time and place. Regardless, the cost of offering nomadic 911 services on a grand scale is rather large. It may not seem it on a per line basis but when you start repeating that process tens of thousands of times the figure starts to grow rather quickly. ViaTalk is soon going to be charging a 911 related service fee to help cover the cost of providing this government mandated service.

We do not enjoy doing so, as we strive to provide a combination of the low cost / reliable service with the best support available. The drawback of operating at the low price level that we do is that there is not a lot of room for us to absorb costs such as these, and thus we are required to pass some of that cost on to our customers.

Hopefully our customer base will be understanding and realize that this fee is necessary in order for us to maintain the quality of service and support they have come to expect from us while still being able to set the pace in the industry for the introduction of new and innovative features down the road.

posted by The Taskmaster

Chi-Town & The Durrty South

6th Sep 2006

Two new datacenters are now online and available for testing for all ViaTalk users. These are listed in the control panel as Chicago, IL, and Richmond, VA. Anyone is free to switch to these at their leisure, and although they are listed as beta they should function exactly the same as the rest of our boxes. Next Up: Seattle.

posted by The Taskmaster