I’m soooo embarrassed and can’t express my apologies to you enough.
On February 17th during the early morning hours our server literally died. It didn’t crash, the hardware actually ceased to function. As a result of the hardware failure our daily back up was corrupted and we lost everything. Fortunately the last backup pre-hardware failure on the 16th was successful.
Needless to say we have now upgraded to a server that has all the bells and whistles with backups, more backups and then more virtual backups.
Unfortunately, all the customer support tickets submitted between the 16th and yesterday around 3:00pm Eastern have been completely lost. I sincerely apologize if this has inconvenienced you in any way.
My team has literally been working around the clock to rectify the situation and get everyone taken care of. It has been all hands on deck since we figured out what happened.
Thankfully the majority of the tickets were answered but if you needed further assistance please re-submit to our new customer support system Zendesk, that we’re now using to ensure this does not happen again.
You can submit your questions here from now on:
support@drivingtraffic.zendesk.com
Thank you for your patience and level of professionalism in handling this situation. I consider myself to have some of the most savvy clients and consider myself very fortunate to work with you.
Thank you and please accept my sincerest apologies,
Ryan Deiss
P.S. For those of you who are contemplating housing your customer support system on your own server, Zendesk is a solution you may want to check out as well. Having scripts like our previous customer support ticket system can make life much more difficult.
Needless to say I’ve been researching this even before the death of our server, and Zendesk is a great online application that does not hinge on nothing ever going wrong with your own server.
To learn more about Zendesk you can check it our here (this is not an affiliate link):
I figure if you can head off any possible fires by learning from our experiences then this while very untimely and inconvenient was an educational exercise.
February 21st, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Ryan,
Life happens even when we do our best to prepare for the worst. I think we can all learn a lesson from your response to catastrophe in general…take a deep breath, rally the forces, graciously apologize, and move on.
Thanks for being such a terrific role model as a person as well as an entrepreneur.
Sincerely,
Cheryl
February 21st, 2009 at 11:48 pm
I guess it happens to the best of them. I have not heard of zendesk but will add that as an option to our membership site - I am sure our members will be interested.
February 22nd, 2009 at 12:47 am
Thanks for the heads-up Ryan. Always god to learn from the experiences of others. Your experience is especially helpful to anyone who’s business hinges on their website and it’s database being functional, not only for records of purchases and client details, but for running day-to-day trade.
Thanks once again for sharing.
February 22nd, 2009 at 8:40 am
Ouch - glad you got everything sorted now. And Thanks for the zendesk tip Ryan!
Your post actualy comes at a great time as I’m currently looking for something similar myself. I was actually thinking about trying the software they have at freehelpdesk.org, but it’s always good to have a recommendation.
I guess when it comes to good customer service, a helpdesk is the way forward.
Thanks again,
AJ
February 22nd, 2009 at 10:44 am
Ouch, that stinks! Sorry to hear. Hope you are liking Zendesk. However, we decided to go with the Web Help Desk Software Free Edition and couldn’t be happier. Worth checking out…
Here is a cut-and-paste from their site:
Help Has Arrived. The free help desk software by Web Help Desk is feature rich, intuitive, and creates instant productivity.
The free edition contains:
- No Trial Period or Expiration Date
- Software Completely Free From Ads
- Unrestricted Lite Edition Functionality
- Free Software Upgrades for One Year
Free help desk software features include:
- Self Service and Ticket Submission Portal
- E-Mail to Ticket Conversion
- Knowledge Base - Internal and External
- 2-Way E-Mail Communications
- SLA E-Mail Alerts and Reminders
- LDAP and AD Integration
- Run Help Desk Performance Reports
February 22nd, 2009 at 4:19 pm
Never had a server crash… I guess I’ve never had my own server so… But it’s cool that you write a blog post explaining and apologizing! I will try to make sure that my server has all the bells and whistles so that this situation hopefully won’t happen!
thanks for the honesty Ryan!
February 24th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
We all run into problems sometimes, its how we handle those problems we face so don’t be embarrassed.
thank you
Derrick
February 24th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Hi
Thanks for the Zendesk comment. I’m a Zendesk Customer Advocate and pleased to hear your support for the application. Keep sharing the good karma.http://www.zendesk.com
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:04 pm
my websites server has never crashed which is a plus for me.