Chaos feared on Venture-Net server change day
The service provider is trying its best to spread the news.
WHEN it changes servers on March 23, Venture-Net, the South Coast’s first established Internet service provider, is hoping to avert the chaos it experienced during the previous server change, five years ago.
However, Venture-Net staff members are not optimistic. They are standing by to deal with “the day of the tsunami”, their reference to the expected flood of calls, on March 23, from irate customers who never bothered to read their notices sent to them over the last four months.
The last server change occurred in October 2010 and it saw local media inundated with calls speculating the demise of Venture-Net. For this reason, Venture-Net has contacted the local media about the planned server change.
“Venture-Net is merely changing the operating platform to a hosted server in a secure data centre based in South Africa in order to better serve our customers,” said company spokesman John Saunders.
He said the last change had been preceded by the normal 30-day notice to customers. It was thought that all customers had read these notices. However, on the day of the change and the devastating days that followed Venture-Net realised most customers had, in fact, not bothered to read the notice. The change had come as a complete surprise to them and this had resulted in the barrage of support calls flooding the Venture-Net call centre. The exchange, hopelessly inadequate for the unusual call volume, had crashed and it had taken two weeks to restore service.
“Once the chaos had abated, we investigated the problem. Structured emails were sent out and all customers who actually read the email were tracked. To our dismay we discovered that a mere 10 percent of customers had taken the time to open our notice. It was at this time we became aware of the root cause of the problem. Over 80 percent of our customers either did not open the notice we sent via email or did not open it in time to be able to do anything about it,” Mr Saunders said.
According to him, the current planned change had been decided upon in May last year and Venture-Net had been hard at work trying to avoid a recurrence of the 2010 fiasco. Customer contact details had been continually verified. Notice of the impending change had been sent out to customers in November 2014 and monthly updates had been forwarded to the customers over the next three months.
“We have also sent an anonymous survey request to assist us with assessing customers’ likes, dislikes, wants and needs,” he added.
Sadly Venture-Net had noticed a frighteningly similar trend in the response to these communications. Its survey had resulted in a response of 10 percent within 30 days and an increase to 15 percent in 60 days. These results revealed the glaring reality of a repeat performance, on March 23, of the October 2010 disaster.
“While Venture-Net has tried to provide the most comprehensive list of instructions for a large variety of email clients on the most popular devices, computers and tablets, we are worried that customers who have not taken the time to read the notices will still be blissfully ignorant of the impending change.
“These customers will be irate and will imply that their entire livelihood and the success of their businesses relied on their email service. They will insist that Venture-Net dispatch technicians to attend to their computers or, in some cases, they will insist that Venture-Net carry the cost of their computer dealer to effect the changes.” said Mr Saunders.
The company has therefore asked the local media to spread the news – and to prepare for the inevitable barrage of calls that staff might have to field on March 23.
