Outsource off-hours support service recommendations?

Question

We have a small engineering team and the need to handle 24x7 emergency support (i.e., responding to outages in our service APIs, so more of a NOC responsibility than customer support). Today our engineers have an on-call phone, but too often we miss initial reports because the phone isn't loud enough, isn't in the right room, etc. I'm not confident we can flush out all the issues that would ensure a single person with a single phone will always answer.

We assume it would be best to hire a company as first line of defense outside of working hours to field calls and escalate internally as needed.

Basic searches for outsource NOC/customer support yields dozens of companies that look more or less identical. Any recommendations for an approach or a specific organization that offers these services? Of course we're trying to put this together as inexpensively as possible.

Answer 1

We went through this same scenario and went with an inexpensive answering service. We gave the service a simple script to run through to assess the severity of the problem. The hope was to avoid waking someone up unless it was really necessary. We had a primary and a secondary Blackberry which rotated among the team. The service was instructed to get the customer's contact information and then call the primary. If the primary went unanswered after some number of tries, call the secondary. If the secondary didn't answer, the service called the manager's cell phone. Whichever of the 3 of us the service reached first would return the customer's call.

In practice we were lucky if the service got the product name captured correctly. We couldn't rely on them for problem severity assessment. They did get the contact information for us. Fortunately our customer base was honest enough that they didn't wake us up for silliness (most of the time).

What sort of SLA do you have in place with your customers? That will also factor into how robust an off-hours call mechanism is required.

Answer 2

Why outsource? Why not insource? Since the problem will be escalated to you anyway, this seems to be the most logical solution.

Just rotate weekly and make one of you an on-call person that will get woken up during the night. If you are lucky, he might be the only one who gets woken up.

This solution has an added bonus that it stimulates you to maintain a reliable service, so you don't lose your night sleep. Plus, a customer that is calling gets a knowledgeable person to answer the phone instead of a call center drone that runs him through a script.

Of course, this needs to be appropriately compensated. In my company on call person gets 20% of a daily wage as an "inconvenience" bonus plus a normal overtime pay for the actual hours he gets to work extra.