This post about us going dark during business hours of our US-based clients is a mixture of two issues I personally enjoy heavily: improving customer support in our offshore rails development agency and utilising SaaS tools to provide more „international” experience.

Problem

One of the most painful parts of working as/with an offshore company is fighting with the timezone difference. It can be neutralised with a good process – having frequent status update calls, using proper PM tools and organising work in, for example, weekly sprints.

But, as usual, this stuff doesn’t matter much when there’s a crisis: with recent outages like the ones caused by Sandy hurricane – nothing listed above can help. There are just times when a client has to get in touch with the provider. What should happen if usual (Skype, email) ways fail?

Resolution

This is obvious for local cooperations: grab a phone and dial someone. Everyone who received an email from us should have our +48 phone numbers, and while the cost is quite manageable when contacting from inside of the EU, it can get quite expensive on the US <-> Poland line.

I had set up a US-based toll free number for our long-term US-based clients to contact us in cases of emergency. There are couple ways to do this – we went with Grasshopper. It was as simple as registering and contacting their support to launch international number. It’s $12/month for a number and a varying rate for incoming calls, but this cost compared to what losses could be caused by us going completely dark for our customers could be, is like nothing.

I forwarded the number to my cell phone (which is always with me). There, it’s done. Then it was a matter of communicating this to our clients with a huge disclaimer saying it’s for critical purposes – and guess what? They did realise it from the very beginning and so far are very reasonable about it.

Profits

• we can handle emergencies better
• our services are getting more of the local (or international) sense
• our clients can be less worried about not being able to contact us during their peak hours

There are, of course, other ways to handle this kind of stuff – SLAs and such, but it’s a different matter. For us, it’s another small milestone achieved.

One of Monterail clients is Stefan Wolpers. On top of other dozen exciting things, Stefan organizes StartUp Camp Berlin. We have been lucky enough to be invited by him to the event. So Bartosz and I spent the last weekend in a vibrant atmosphere of Berlin-Kreuzberg at Startup Camp Berlin 2012. Vibrant has actually kept on being the main theme throughout the whole event.

First of all, Berlin is a 3 hour drive from Wrocław. A very pleasant one in mid-March. The proximity is not a surprising fact while lazily scrolling through the map. Not until one actually does hop into the car and after a while finds herself amazed by the atmosphere of the city and the event itself.

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