Carr America Trims Tech Support Response Time by 75 Percent
CarrAmerica Realty Corp., a firm that develops, owns and operates office buildings throughout the United States, found that growth was exerting an increasingly unmanageable burden on the company's customer service and information technology units. Faced with the prospect of hiring additional technical support staff members, the company found a money-saving solution in MessengerPlus, an advanced AS/400 monitoring system from Bytware, Inc.
Vital information pertaining to CarrAmerica's properties, including size and availability, is kept in a central database in the company's Washington, D.C., headquarters. CarrAmerica, which is traded as CRE on the New York Stock Exchange, operates 14 remote property management market offices throughout the nation. CarrAmerica personnel in those offices connect to the company's central AS/400 in Washington to obtain information on vacancies, lease rates, tenant profiles, financial reports and other essential data. CarrAmerica—whose tenants include the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Eastman Kodak, Hitachi Telecom, the Walt Disney Co., Bank of America, Intel Corp., Time Warner Communications, General Motors and Microsoft Corp.—found that customer support calls were consuming a growing percentage of valuable time. Upon receipt of a complaint or a problem report, CarrAmerica technicians called the customer as quickly as possible to offer an estimate of the time frame within which they expected to work on the reported problem—preferably no longer than one or two hours. Still, that was far too slow in the view of Kevin Williams, CarrAmerica's AS/400 systems manager.
The Solution
Williams ultimately achieved a dramatic improvement in response time with the use of Bytware's MessengerPlus, which encompasses monitoring, message management, notification and statistical reporting functions. MessengerPlus monitors AS/400 activity and provides notification about incomplete jobs, disk and hardware problems and failures, communication errors, security violations, power failures, and other critical functions. MessengerPlus can deliver alert messages to alphanumeric and numeric pagers, to two-way pagers, or to e-mail addresses. It can also leave messages on voice-mail systems using tonal codes to designate events. Two-way paging and e-mail allow technicians to respond to messages and initiate corrective functions directly from their two-way pagers or e-mail, without even signing on to the AS/400.
Williams recalled how impressed he had been with a demonstration of MessengerPlus that he first saw in a trade show a couple of years ago. CarrAmerica (www.carramerica.com) was already using an AS/400 when Williams joined the company in 1997. At the time, technicians monitored the system manually and were often unaware of problems until they retrieved messages from customers who had called the help desk. At that time, the company was considerably smaller than it is now, and calls to customer service from property managers, staff accountants and lease administrators—who Williams regards as customers—were answered within a reasonable time.
"Nothing remained in the queue for more than day, but as we grew more rapidly, keeping up with customer support for 120 individual AS/400 users became an arduous task," said Williams. "When I first saw MessengerPlus demonstrated at a conference two years ago, I realized it would be one of the greatest things we could do for our help desk." With other more pressing issues demanding his time, Williams had to postpone his investigation of MessengerPlus. But when his overburdened staff and lagging response times became increasingly troublesome, he turned his attention to MessengerPlus to see how it would fit into the company's computing environment. He contacted Bytware and obtained MessengerPlus for a trial evaluation.
"Sara Smith, our AS/400 systems administrator, installed MessengerPlus on a Monday after studying the documentation over the weekend," Williams reported. "Once she configured the application and the modems, it was operational that very first day. And it proved its value the same day. She and I were very impressed with the ease of installation and setup, which is the best I've seen for an AS/400 application." But Williams and Smith derived even greater satisfaction from the immediate performance results they obtained. "We do an incredible amount of printing, and users become infuriated when the system fails to execute a print command. We wanted to achieve better control of print-related problems, whether they involved mechanical problems such as a paper jam or a tray out of paper, or a break in connectivity. Our objective was seamless printing by staying on top of potential printing problems. MessengerPlus enabled us to do that because it immediately informs us of problems even before networked customers become aware of them. And we're able to fix many of those problems without delay, so printing has become more consistently seamless for our users. That is the kind of customer support we hoped to see."Williams reported immediately quantifiable results after installation of MessengerPlus.
"We determined within the first two days of operation that MessengerPlus had decreased our response time to our customer base by 75 percent. I cannot imagine delivering such top-flight support to our customers without MessengerPlus," Williams declared.
MessengerPlus maintains a detailed history of all messages and events monitored and actions taken. It can generate a list of events within criteria that the system administrator can designate, including time period, severity, type of event or application. That's particularly useful in determining which programs or functions are most prone to failure, and in evaluating conditions that precipitate a program crash. MessengerPlus also maintains a detailed history of paging and e-mail activity to reveal the date and time of each message, the message text, and the pager(s) to which each message was sent.
CarrAmerica uses MessengerPlus to monitor all vital system functions, including execution of overnight data backups. When MessengerPlus detects a problem, it issues an alert to the alphanumeric pagers of designated AS/400 technicians. "If a backup is interrupted due to a bad tape sector or other problem, MessengerPlus pages designated technicians. I've received a few such calls in the middle of the night, but I'm often able to reset the backup onto an alternate tape without leaving home," said Williams.
"A page appears as a text stream system message in plain English. It identifies the system, the nature of the problem, and the individual who needs support," explained Williams. The responding technician then calls the customer to inform him or her that the problem has been rectified. "We are often credited with having extra-sensory perception," Williams chuckled. "That is the proactive stance we wanted to take with our customers. MessengerPlus has enabled a significant reduction in help calls from users, and it adds to the perception that our IT department is on top of system performance, which it now is."
MessengerPlus is a second-time winner of the Midrange Computing Product Excellence Award in the "Messaging/Paging" category. Having won in 1999, Bytware also received the 2000 award at the COMMON Spring Conference held this past March 12-17 in San Diego. All three of Bytware's Messenger products, including MessengerConsole and MessengerNT, won product excellence awards this year in their respective categories, reports Christine Grant, president of Bytware, which is located in Reno, Nevada. Such recognition of the product comes at no surprise to Williams, who made his laudatory assessment only three weeks after installation of MessengerPlus.
"In just that short period of time, we've seen how quickly we can react to user issues. We're now providing the level of customer support that we previously desired. MessengerPlus puts us ahead of the curve," declares Williams. The result: not only increased performance and greatly reduced frustration for customers, but a reduction in the amount of time that help desk personnel previously spent explaining and resolving complaints from customers on the phone. "Our level of customer support was good before, but now it's out of this world, thanks to MessengerPlus."
Learn more about Carr America.
Learn more about MessengerPlus.
Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: MessengerPlus
Customer: Carr America
Summary
Faced with the prospect of hiring additional technical support staff members, one of the nation's leading operators of office buildings found a money-saving solution in MessengerPlus, an advanced AS/400 monitoring system from Bytware, Inc.
Case Studies by Product
Other Resources