Talking to IT & Managed Service Providers all day long, we hear about all the trouble around the "on-call" situation. Here are some of the things that tend to come up when we try to talk about this topic and how they try to tackle it.
Please login to the queue when it's your turn
Common scenarios...
- Forgot to login
- Forgot to logout
- You log them all in, but then the call ends up in someone's cell phone voicemail because they turned their phone off
- You log them all in, but then the call ends up in someone's cell phone voicemail because they have bad cell service
- You log them all in, but then the call ends up in someone's cell phone voicemail because someone rejected the call
Sound familiar?
The on-call cell phone
This seems to be a popular way people try to handle this issue on their own. Since there is no automation, a dedicated on-call cell phone is setup. From there, you hope the person that brings that home with them will be on top of it. However, let's be realistic, all of the normal things that happen to someone's cell phone also apply here:
- Forgot to turn if off vibrate
- Forgot to charge it
- Dropped It
- Lost it
- Deep sleep didn't hear it when it went off
- The call went to voicemail and never rang
- And so on...
The Answering Service
This one is popular too. How many times have you tried to send a call to an answering service only for this to happen:
- Name botched
- Message botched
- Call back number botched
- You didn't update the call list when people came to and left the organization, so the message never made it to the right person
- The person is freaking out on the answering service note taker... and they can't get a hold of anyone right away to send the call to
We are not saying these things happen all the time, but in IT, one bad interaction could turn things sour.
Voicemail-to-email / Voicemail-to-ticket
Someone calls after hours and leaves a voicemail that then is supposed to go to:
- An email distribution group that goes to several people... all who didn't check their email
- To your ticketing system, which is supposed to run some sort of special workflow, but it just didn't work properly - possibly because it can't figure out the right company or contact to start from
SMS Message
This sounds like a simple an easy idea until...
- Forgot to turn if off vibrate
- Forgot to charge it
- Dropped It
- Lost it
- Deep sleep didn't hear it when it went off
The Outside Service Desk
So, you decided to forward your calls to an outside service desk or NOC...
- Forwarded calls show up with your company's main number, so they have to spend time asking questions to identify your customer sometimes more time than actually doing the work to help them in the first place
- It turns out that the outside service ended up escalating the work back to your internal team anyway, and then the same answering service style communication kicks off...
App driven option
This is a more modern route to try and address the problem. You have companies like...
- Pager Duty
- Alert Ops
- Victor Ops
- OnPage
- Xmaters
- And others
Some may work with your tools other may need things like emails to trigger. Surely these tools are a bit islanded but can work well.
Would it be nice if....
You could have one app that could...
- Trigger notifications via email, SMS, or voice calls based on your set team hierarchy based on a schedule so when voicemails are left, it would escalate up your notification list until someone says they "got it"?
- Automatically log people into or out of a call queue based on a schedule so that they don't have to remember it's their turn and do something manually?
- Automatically get logged out of a queue if they miss their calls and then notifications are triggered to a manager or supervisor via call, SMS, email?
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