Monthly Archives: June 2011

No “Fail Whale” for Fonolo After Slashdot

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Last Thursday (June 23rd), my company Fonolo was featured on Slashdot, which then it made it’s way to Boing Boing, and a handful of other sites.

Now, this was great news for us, as it generated a TON of traffic into our sites, but I was also understandably concerned about what this extra traffic coming into our system was going to do. I’ve heard (and seen) dozens of horror stories about sites featured on Slashdot, who’s servers simply ended up melting from the extra traffic. Having a full out “fail whale” situation, would simply be an embarrassment to us; and I would consider it a personal failure, given that I have been the chief architect of the Fonolo system.

But despite traffic peaking at ~44MB sustained, our system handled it with tons of room to spare- no interruptions, no failures, no downtime.

and lighttpd handled all the web traffic like a champ.

Why are your customers still waiting on hold?

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Waiting on hold is consistently one of the top complaints about phone-based customer service. One way to eliminate hold time is to hire enough agents that one is always available. Of course, this is cost prohibitive for most companies! Another way is to implement a virtual queuing (VQ) solution.

Shai has written a great series of posts on our VQ offering, Hold-for-Me, on his blog. See, for example:

There are some great cost-savings arguments that support the case for VQ. (I’ve been spending a lot of time working through these scenarios with prospective customers.) But I believe the best case for it is the uplift in customer satisfaction.

In today’s hyper-connected world, delivering a superior experience to your customer is something that echoes quickly and has long-lasting impact. I just came across this quote that sums it up nicely.

 

RIM isn’t going to make it.

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Research in Motion (the company behind the BlackBerry smart phones), released their quarterly updates yesterday, causing their shares to tank- dropping 21% on the TSE. Apparently this was mostly due to product delays and the announcement of layoffs.

The thing I find funny, is the curious 2M drop in volume earlier in the day:

Cough… (insider trading)… cough cough..

Wait until it gets to $20/share and buy! They’ll be Microsoft shares soon enough.