| For your information, this notes conference is now (apparently) accessible to
non-Digital personnel. Its contents, along with that of a large number of other
notes conferences, are being provided on an on-going, read-only basis to certain
"franchised partners".
As long as this continues to be the case, people posting notes here must take
this into account and act accordingly.
Webb Scales
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<<< TURRIS::DISK$NOTES_PACK2:[NOTES$LIBRARY]DIGITAL_UNIX.NOTE;1 >>>
-< DIGITAL UNIX (FORMERLY KNOWN AS DEC OSF/1) >-
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Note 8514.0 Partner interaction opportunities w/ Tech Support 9 replies
SMURF::TAPPAN 103 lines 20-JAN-1997 11:31
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The following has been posted with permission from Sarah Booth and should
be reviewed by all participants in this notes file.
thanks,
moderator
Subject: Partner interaction opportunities w/ Tech Support Center(1-800-digital)
From: Sarah Booth ([email protected])
Feel free to share this information throughout your organizations.
This note is the fulfillment of an action item I took from a staff meeting
in December where JoAnne Falco, from the Technical Support Center
(1-800-digital), presented a summary of the support center's activities.
A few of us from TPEG met with them recently to drill down on exactly
where the interaction opportunities are and communicate those to UBPG
at large.
To recap the structure of the Technical Support Center:
o 1-800-digital calls are taken from all sources (partners, end users,
new customers) on all topics related to sales / pre-sales topics: order
placement/tracking, technical issues/questions, newly released product
information, etc.
o The people answering the calls are organized into frontline support
and various backup support groups. The frontline folks take the initial
calls, get basic information from the customer/partner, and either
answer the inquiry or direct it to the right backup group. All of this
is handled via a very sophisticated call center application run on
TruClustered 8400's (the one failover they experienced so far went
without a hitch), in our newly renovated TAY2 call center facility.
o The Technical Support Center website is accessible only by internal Digital
users, Franchised, and Certified partners. There are 5 Franchised partners:
Hamilton/Avnet, Pioneer, TotalTech, Wylie and Gates/Arrow. There are
approximately 500 Certified Partners and the list grows larger everyday. A
Franchised partner is one who does a significant amount of business with
Digital and qualifies to see a level of product information, futures and
technical details not available to Certified partners. Currently, the one
source of information Franchised partners have access to that Certified
partners don't is read-only access to Digital product-oriented notesfiles.
This is an important point for all engineers or others responding in internal
notesfiles to know - our Franchised partners now read those files so
please keep that in mind when crafting your responses.
How to access the Technical Support Center website:
Internally: http:://cosmo.tay.dec.com:82
Externally (Franchised and Certified Partners): http://www.partner.digital.com
You can direct partners you deal with (OEM's, VAR's, resellers) to this
website for information. In order to get access to all information
available to Certified partners they will have to get a Digital BusinessLink
(DBL) password by filling out the form on the DBL webpage they're initially
directed to including the data "need TIPs privs" in the memo field. Their
application is then qualified and in several days, they'll receive their
DBL password.
Our opportunities for interaction:
o With the UNIX technical support backup phone support group -
This is a group of about 14 people managed by Steve Tamagna. They handle
approximately 300 Digital UNIX calls a day ranging from configuration help
to detailed information on new product offerings. There's a back-up
pre-sales support agreement in place so any questions Steve's group can't
answer escalate through Dianna Ellis into DUNIX engineering. Opportunties
for interacting with this group include:
- offer by them to conduct (small) surveys with DUNIX customers on
areas we'd like more data on (some examples that come to mind include
Y2k plans, interest/requirements for clustered systems).
- opportunity for engineers to listen in on conversations with customers
to get an idea of the kinds of questions asked, where customers are
having problems.
o Via the website with partners:
- dissemination of technical product information to partners. Engineers/
prod mgrs / doc writers can use this forum to relay more detailed technical
(some futures) information to our partners to help in their sales of
Digital UNIX products. Beau Seagraves in TPEG (flume::beau) will act as
conduit between UBPG and this website to get the information into the
required format and make sure it stays current. It's expected that a prior
review for suitability of the content for this audience will have happened
within the submitter's organization, and TPEG can help advise on this.
- opportunity to participate in chat sessions focused on a particular
area or topic. The website folks said they were planning to start this
up soon and would notify us as to when and what kinds of expertise they'd
need. We could also be proactive here in suggesting areas that we think
make sense to conduct a chat session on.
Lastly, Joanne Falco and Bob Mack agreed to look into pulling together
summaries for us on a periodic basis of customer inquiries. All inquiries
and answers are logged in the call center database and it would be insightful
to see what kinds of problems are encountered and where we could improve our
products and documentation based on this data.
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