Where's my 9.3?

Posted on: February 8th, 2008

Still waiting to hear from either Customer Service or your Account Manager about that ePublisher 9.3 request you submitted? You are not alone. Some of our customers may have noticed that it took a little while to hear back from us when they requested upgrades to ePublisher 9.3. In fact, some customers are still experiencing delays. So why is this happening?

The simple answer is that we used the release of ePublisher 9.3 to try something new in our internal process.

Coupled with a greater than expected demand for upgrades, we created a process that simply tried to do too much.

ePublisher 9.3 included a slight change to the licensing model that we hoped would streamline the process and make it more manageable and easier to administer for both ourselves and our customers. It seems to have had the opposite effect. We also decided to use the opportunity to do a data point check on customer information in our new Customer Relationship Management tool (making sure we had names, contacts details, product version, maintenance status and license information all up to date etc.)

The result was that what had largely been an automated process before has become a mix of automation and manually checking and verifying each request. While this has lead to improved quality and more accurate information in our customer database, it means that the process has slowed down considerably. Add in the demand for ePublisher 9.3 and our system became overloaded.

Over the last few weeks we have reviewed the process, made some changes, shifted priorities and the backlog has been substantially decreased, but we still have a backlog. The number of 9.3 upgrades we are processing each day is now being matched by the number of requests.

So we are reviewing the process once more, seeing what we can change, plus we are adding more resources to help alleviate the problem.

We are still in the process of upgrading our customer service capability. Our goal is to provide outstanding customer service, something that we regret has escaped us in the past. We are now striving for that goal and will not settle for less than achieving that goal. In the meantime, we are still learning, and dealing with some unexpected challenges. We are grateful for the patience and support that our customers have shown and look forward to smoother operations in the very near future.