This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Follow us on Twitter for more information on our products.
We’re seven members strong now and we’re able to add a lot of things our customers have been seeking. The bigger team also lets each of us work on support projects other than answering emails lightning fast. Since our sysops, developers and designers have been rightly bragging about the great things they’re doing, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell you about what our amazing team has been doing to improve customer happiness.
Basecamp 101
The mere whisper of the word ‘webinar’ used to make my blood run cold. The library and academic worlds (my old stomping grounds) are lousy with them. I found them to be time sinks where people who didn’t have a full grasp of a topic held their attendees virtually hostage as we endured technical difficulties and dry Powerpoint presentations. My bias came with me when I got to 37signals, so I was surprised to see the number of customers who really wanted a webinar.
After a bit of research in the Fall, Merissa and Chase started a “Basecamp 101” online class that now runs almost every week. I have to say, it’s really terrific. If other webinars had butts, Chase and Merissa’s would be kicking them. Their class is fun and it gives space for potential customers to ask questions of Merissa, Chase and Michael at the end.
It’s exciting tell our customers that we can offer them a demonstration of setting up a project before they even sign up for Basecamp. If you want to check it out sometime, the next one is always listed on our Help page.
Help Videos
There’s plenty of research demonstrating different learning styles, and the support team can definitely attest to the fact that not everyone learns best by reading help documentation. We have some pretty great help pages, but sometimes words and screenshots can’t do justice to some of the features and functions of Basecamp or Highrise. Chase made it his mission to create some really great screencasts for many of our frequently asked questions. You can see the ones he’s created for Basecamp and Highrise. They’ve been a great asset for the support team and have helped our customers in a big way.
Live Chat
Through the Summer and Fall of 2011, we ran live help chat (thanks to our pals at Olark) on highrisehq.com to assist potential customers who had a few questions before signing up for a plan. The whole support team spent a few hours on live chat each day and we noticed that a lot of current customers were using the service to get help. We decided to give it a shot in Basecamp accounts as a premium support feature.
If you’re an admin on a Max Basecamp plan or any Suite, you’ll see this friendly little box at the bottom of your Basecamp dashboard:

Of course, we did endure some “Who the heck is this?”s and “Are you a robot?”s the first few weeks, but we’re almost two months into offering the feature and it’s been a great experience. The team can answer questions faster and it’s a true pleasure to interact with our customers in a new way.
Faster Common Requests
Resident support whiz kid Ann is not just great at helping us answer support questions, she’s also quite handy with the console as well. Every day we see some common requests that involve some On Call programmer work and Ann’s been taking on a lot of the common tasks that we used to send to the programming team, including things like:
Un-sticking Highrise exports/imports
Finding out who deleted/moved something or changed permissions in an app (known in the support team as an “Ooooh, girl, who…” question )
Creating file archives
It’s been a huge load off our On Call team and it helps us take care of our customers much faster than they expect.
These are all things we’ve been able to add to support in the past five months, and Basecamp Next isn’t even out yet. I don’t know about you, but I’m excited to see what the rest of 2012 holds.
The great thing about keeping score is that you can track your progress. We started asking customers who contacted support what they thought about the interaction in 2010. We were thrilled to end that year with just seven out of a hundred being unhappy with the service (and 84% being happy, 9% being OK).
But I’m really proud to announce that we’ve dramatically raised our game in 2011. We’ve gotten the frown ratio down to just three out of a hundred (90% being happy, 7% being OK). That’s less than half of what it was just the year before!
(If you look at just the last six months of 2011, it went even better still: 92% happy, 5% OK, 3% frowns).
Part of this is hiring a bigger team so the average number of emails each person has to answer is less. We’ve gone from needing each person to answer about 80 emails per day to just around 40 (again, on average—there were and are significant swings at times). That of course means that we can spend more time on each response and making more customers happier is the result.
Gains have also come from analyzing the data. Finding out what made people unhappy and trying to do better. We also now follow up with more frowns and try hard to “flip ‘em” by doing what we can to make a bad experience great.
I’m so proud of our support team for what they’ve accomplished this year. Thank you Ann, Chase, Emily, Joan, Kristin, Merissa, and Michael.
Kristin is the latest addition to our stellar customer support team. She joins Michael, Merissa, Ann, and Jason R. in making our customers happy everyday. Kristin works out of our Chicago office. Welcome Kristin, it’s great to have you on the team.
Since we launched a public window on Smiley a few weeks ago, over 20,000 people have visited it to see how we’re doing against our goal of making customers happy, not just satisfied.
I recently took a look at responses to Smiley since we started using it last fall. The whole point of exposing Smiley publicly was to encourage transparency, and I’d like to continue that by sharing the same results I shared with everyone here. I’ll give the results first; for those of you interested in the “how”, I’ll share details at the end.
What we’re learning from Smiley
About 30% of people who write to support end up rating our response. We’re very happy with 30% – that’s quite high for a completely optional survey.
Across all of those responses, our report card looks like this:
In my mind, the key metric is really the portion that said their interaction was great. If someone said it was just ok or if they said not so good, those both indicate something we could be doing differently.
I dug a little deeper to understand how happiness varies:
More people rated their interaction as “great” in 2011 than 2010 (87% vs 83%). This has been climbing over the last two months as well.
People whose tickets are fully resolved within a day of submitting them are more likely to be happy than those that took longer (87% vs. 81%; in the last six months, we’ve resolved 84% of our tickets within a day of submission, including weekends).
Happiness is pretty consistent across products – ranging from a low of 83% saying great to a high of 86%
Happiness doesn’t vary much by the specific plan someone is on. Elite Suite customers are just as happy as customers using a free version.
Aside from rating the experience great, ok, or not so good, we allow people to leave open ended comments. 59% of people have ended up leaving comments so far. I decided to take a look at what people are saying:
The average comment is 12 words. The most common words people used in their responses were: quick, thanks, answer, fast, friendly, problem, question, reply, time, great, clear, helpful, issue, support, service, prompt, good, solution, feature, solved, and timely.
I also took a special look at the written comments of people who weren’t happy with their support interaction. More of these people wrote comments (63%) and their comments were twice as long as average. Their comments connect well with what we suspected – people appreciate getting clear answers right away, and when we aren’t able to make someone happy, it’s often because of a feature request that we aren’t able to commit to immediately.
We’re happy to see happiness increasing over time, and have a bunch of ideas in the works to keep boosting this. I hope you keep watching with us at the 37signals Customer Support Happiness Report.
If you’re curious how I did this analysis, read on…
Props to Jason, Ann, and Michael for delivering some serious happiness to our customers on support this week. Usually it’s pretty tough to get the last 50 responses above a 90-rating on even a good day and right now everyone is doing it. Only 4 frowns out of the last 250 comments (or ~1700 interactions as only ~15% of people contacting support will rate the interaction).
Jason’s latest Inc. Magazine column: “People don’t judge you on the basis of your mistakes — they judge you on the manner in which you own up to them. In my experience, most companies do a terrible job of taking blame. They lob press releases. Or they apologize for the inconvenience. Resist that temptation and say you’re sorry like you’re apologizing to a friend. Be good — and your customers will be good right back to you.” Jason’s other columns at Inc.
We’re looking for two more people to join our customer service team. This time we’re looking for people who live in the Chicagoland area.
You’ll provide “it was so good they couldn’t stop talking about it” customer service via email for Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. You’ll also be responsible for chiming in on 37signals Answers, updating and improving the articles in our help section, writing tutorials and how-tos. We’ll also be exploring phone support and in-person training shortly, so that should be something you’d like to do as well.
You’ll be expected to answer about 75 emails per day once you’re fully up to speed (2-3 months on-ramp). This is a significant volume, so be sure that you’re ready and able to deal with that kind of challenge.
We’re looking for someone who loves to help others, someone who can keep smiling even when dealing with tough customers (empathy is important), and someone who has a passion for our products and company. You should enjoy the process of making an anxious customer a happy customer.
In addition, you have to be an excellent writer who enjoys writing. Our customers love when we get back to them within 10 minutes with a clear, concise, and friendly answer. Great writing is key.
How to apply
Please submit a cover letter explaining:
Why you want to work in customer support.
Why you want to work at 37signals and not somewhere else.
A description of a great customer service/support experience you had recently, and what made it great.
Also, attach the following writing samples:
Explain in 3 paragraphs or less why a customer would pick Basecamp vs Highrise.
Respond to a customer asking for Gantt charts in Basecamp that it’s not something we offer, but suggest using the Milestone section instead.
A company using our job board failed to find to find a suitable candidate and wants a refund. Respond that we don’t offer refunds for job postings.
We offer health-care coverage, a 401K with a generous match, a Flexible Spending Account, plus a progressive work environment. Starting salary is $45,000 with a review in a year. You must live in the Chicagoland area.
Email everything to jointheteam@37signals.com. Include “Customer Support” in the subject line. If you’re attaching a resume, please send it as a PDF. Note: We look favorably on people who get creative with their applications.
[Sitting next to Craig Newmark while waiting for a delayed flight.] I’d heard Craig say in interviews that he was basically just “head of customer service” for Craigslist but I always thought that was a throwaway self-deprecating joke…But sitting next to him, I got a whole new appreciation for what he does. He was going through emails in his inbox, then responding to questions in the craigslist forums, and hopping onto his cellphone about once every ten minutes. Calls were quick and to the point “Hi, this is Craig Newmark from craigslist.org. We are having problems with a customer of your ISP and would like to discuss how we can remedy their bad behavior in our real estate forums”. He was literally chasing down forum spammers one by one, sometimes taking five minutes per problem, sometimes it seemed to take half an hour to get spammers dealt with. He was totally engrossed in his work, looking up IP addresses, answering questions best he could, and doing the kind of thankless work I’d never seen anyone else do with so much enthusiasm.
—
Matt Haughey explains where he learned to love customer service. [via AD]
Thank you for your recent e-mail inquiry to Qwest. I apologize for the delay in responding to your e-mail. I apologize for your frustration but you must call 1-866-283-0043 for assistance with your VoIP service.
Late Monday afternoon David, Kiran, and I were discussing how we could begin to measure how our customers felt about our customer service. We’re already measuring things like response time, average tickets per day per person, average tickets in a thread, etc. Those stats are helpful for measuring internal efficiency and speed, but they don’t measure quality from a customer’s perspective.
The idea
We talked about it for a bit and came up with this basic goal: Let’s make it really easy for our customers to quickly rate our customer service every time we talk to them. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not a breakthrough idea, but it wasn’t something we were doing. It was time we experimented with the concept. We’d write some software and try it out. We’d call the app Smiley.
The key
The whole feedback process had to be easy, it had to be fast, and it couldn’t be a burden on our customers. We didn’t want to put people in front of some long-winded complicated survey — no one likes filling those out. We just wanted to ask them one quick question and that was it. The whole thing should take about five seconds and it should be entirely optional. We’d start there and see how it went.
Linked from the email signature
We decided we would add a short link to each support person’s email signature. The link would encode the support person’s ID along with the ticket number for the support request. When someone clicked the link they’d go to our site where they’d be asked to answer one question about the customer service experience they just had. That’s all.
Starting on the design
The next morning I went off and started designing some screens. After a few minutes I had the basic structure. There were five screens total: Three customer facing (and two of those were optional), two internally facing.
(Customer facing) One screen which asked a customer a single question with three possible answers.
(Customer facing – optional) One screen with a single text field where someone could choose to elaborate on their answer. This was entirely optional.
(Customer facing – only seen if someone provides freeform text feedback) One thank you screen someone would see after they submitted their feedback.
(Internal) One screen that showed all our customer service people along with their most recent ratings, their overall average rating, and a link to see all their ratings and feedback.
(Internal) One screen that showed all of someone’s ratings along with any feedback a customer left on a particular rating.
About an hour or so later I had the customer facing screens done. We went back and forth on a few iterations, and experimented with two options (“great” and “not great”) vs. three options (“great”, “fine”, and “not very good” – we picked this version), but overall the design was settled in about an hour. Originally I used some stock photo smiley faces for the mockup, but I asked Jamie to design some custom smileys for the design (you’ll see these below).
The screen the customer sees after clicking a link in the email signature.
The optional screen a customer sees if they answer the first question.
Hooking it up
Next David took the UI and began writing the Rails back-end to make it all work. While David was working on this, I started working on the internal facing admin screens. I spent a few hours messing around with some ideas, but eventually settled on the simplest version:
We’re looking for a new person to join our support team (internally known as Team Omega), and we thought we’d let you in on what it’s like doing support for 37signals. It’s not like working behind the customer service counter at Wal-Mart. It’s not like answering calls in a phone bank, or automating responses like an email robot. It’s undoubtedly the best job I’ve ever had, and I hope it’s the last job I have.
I’ve been doing support for 37signals for almost 4 years. I didn’t want to at first; in fact when I was interviewed and eventually hired I was explicit: I will not do customer service. This left me doing back office sort of admin things and keeping myself busy, until one day I had to help Jason out on emails. Then daily I kept taking on more and more until one day I said to Jason, “Stop taking all the customer emails from me!”
They let me take over support full time, and I can’t tell you how surprising it is that I love this job. I love it so much that I’m passionate about it, I fight for it, I push back against very heavy opinions to protect it and improve how we help our customers. So what in the world made me go from never wanting to answer customer support emails to answering sometimes 200 a day by myself? Well, pretty simply, our customers are awesome!
Our customers love our products. They are loyal and fierce about them. They write us for help making sure everything works because they can’t imagine working without Basecamp or Highrise or Backpack. They want new features because they want to do more with our products. They’re funny, they are so kind and patient, they’re opinionated and friendly. 200+ emails a day of that sort? Bring it on.
We take support seriously as a way to educate and help. We use bad experiences our customers have to improve our products and processes, and turn that experience into a positive one. Our support team is a vital connection to our customers other teams don’t have, and we use that link to determine how to make our products better. We let people vent, and we understand their frustration. We stop and think to ourselves, “How can I make this person’s experience better?” Then whatever that is, we do it.
Support at 37signals was not good 5 years ago. It wasn’t and we know it. It took years of us recovering from stumbles in the beginning to be the support team we are today: Enthusiastic, fast, agile, happy to be here and eager to help. Not all of us come from customer service backgrounds, and we don’t think it’s required to do this job well.
What’s required is a will to make people’s day better, to teach them how do to things, to surprise them with speed and accuracy and become leaders in the support industry. And if you think that sounds awesome, why not come join us?
We think you’ll like it here. Plus, there’s often cookies.
Summary
Kiran Max Weber and Sarah Hatter, two members of 37signals support team, discuss what it’s like helping out customers, the pros and cons of email-based support, and more.
More episodes
Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS. Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast.
Spread the word
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“Learn your way around a Mac” = friendlier language than the typical “Take a tour…” (seen here).
Interesting to see that, at the end of the Macbook features page, Apple devotes a large block to pimping its support efforts (“Your own team of experts.”).
The Energy Saver icon in System Prefs goes green. [via Treehugger]
I spent almost 45 minutes on the phone with my bank today because of an error with their online banking. I didn’t want to, I had to, after their email support told me my issue couldn’t be handled online. It was such a mind-numbing, protracted, time wasting experience that it made me ask myself, “How can anyone ever ask us why we don’t offer phone support?”
In a perfect world, calling a business for help would be quick, painless, productive, and human. But it’s not and it’s not going to be. That old time ideal of calling the local retailer or company and talking with someone after two rings was demolished by the call centers and overseas help desks that sprung up in the information age. It’s time to stop thinking that phone support is so essential. We’re lucky that we have an email support system that works and is incredibly efficient considering the volume of customers we interact with daily. It works because we’re committed to making it work, and if we can do it every company with a mailserver can do it too.
Now, I know people want to pick up a phone and talk to a live human being. We all want assurance that our money is being spent on something maintained by human beings who speak our language and hopefully live in our same country. I get that instinct, because I share it at times. I also totally and completely understand some people’s experience with email tech support is way too techy, unreliable or frustrating and dialing an 800 number is an escape from that. What I don’t get it is why a person would rather sit on the phone for however long it takes – maybe 45 minutes!!! – rather than send an email and go about their life while it’s read and replied to.
Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can’t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can’t get someone else’s input or feedback.
Emails can be printed out and saved. They can be sent to someone else who can chime in on the thread. They’re a historical document you don’t have to copy down hurriedly while information is spewed out to you. They can be sent quickly, tagged, labeled, archived. You can send an email whenever you want, there’s no business hours to abide by or schedule to confer with.
We get requests every day from people who don’t think email support will cut it and demand a phone number to call us. Their worries are assuaged when they get a reply from me in less than 15 minutes that is informative, helpful and obviously written by a human being. It’s absolutely 100% possible to provide excellent customer care without a phone or phone number, and our company proves that daily.
We recently added a support request form to Basecamp (there used to be just a direct email link). The goal of this form: To prioritize support inquiries, reduce uncertainty, and get people the answers they need faster. It also reduces the number of back and forth information-gathering emails, which ultimately makes everyone more satisfied with the support experience.
It’s worked really well so far too. But the last question in the original form was missing the mark:
We wanted to know how important the problem was and gauge the emotional state of the person writing to us. But this pulldown just didn’t cut it.
First off, it required too much reading for a pulldown menu. Who wants to process this much info when there’s a problem? Also bad: It’s a pulldown but the options aren’t mutually exclusive. Someone could very well be confused AND worried AND upset. This pulldown just muddies the waters.
So we decided to change it to an actual scale. 1 = not a big deal, 4 = I need help ASAP.
Much easier to process but it still wasn’t helping us learn whether or not this query was a top priority or not. Why? Because everyone’s problem is urgent.
For example, let’s say someone’s having trouble uploading a file. If they can’t figure out how to upload a file, they’ll say it’s urgent. If file uploading is broken, they’ll still say it’s urgent.
That’s no help to us. Of course, we’ll get back to them either way. But if file uploading is broken, we need to know that immediately so we can fix it. If it’s just confusing someone, that’s a different ballgame. We’ll still quickly resolve the issue, but it’s not a fire that has to be put out instantly.
We thought about adding in a radio button question that asked “Is something broken?” But we didn’t want to make the form any longer. (No one likes feeling interrogated while seeking help.)
So we went back to the drawing board and came up with this solution:
This gets at what we really want to know here: What kind of problem is this? We lost the subjective nature of the original “give us your emotional state” question and replaced it with a clear question with a clear answer. It’s better to ask for facts than emotions.
Now, if something’s broken, we can spot it and fix it right away. A system failure is much more important to us (and our customers) than a feature request or general feedback. This method lets us prioritize these queries accordingly, instead of treating them like they’re all the same.
Update: Per feedback on this thread, we’ve adjusted the menu to the following (more consistent language, no more “general feedback” category since “other” is close enough). Thanks for your comments.
This is the fifth in a series of posts showing how we use Campfire as our virtual office. All screenshots shown are from real usage and were taken during one week in September.
We use a separate room within Campfire to discuss customer support issues. This helps us keep all these related conversations in one place and keeps the main room (fairly) distraction-free. Again, the ability to quickly share screens is a killer feature here. Let’s take a look…
Turn a customer support query into a site change
Jamis deals with an admin setting problem and Ryan suggests a confirmation dialog change. Jamis plugs it in and Subversion reports the update.
Upload a problem screen submitted by a customer
Sarah Hatter helps out on a lot of support queries these days. Here she uploads a screen sent in by a customer and asks for advice on how to solve the issue. (Skitch is a helpful tool for marking up and sharing screenshots quickly.)
A few years ago I switched from Cingular to T-Mobile because Cingular’s customer service stunk. My experience today was another proof that I made the right choice.
Late Saturday night my beloved Samsung T509 had full signal in my apartment, but I couldn’t place or receive any calls. Heading outside, I walked six blocks before my calls would go through. Some kind of cell phone black hole was centered right on my apartment. What a bummer, especially when you’re trying to order pizza without a landline.
So the next morning I went out for brunch beyond the boundary of the black hole. I called T-Mobile with a forkful of chilaquiles and expected to wait on hold. Much to my surprise, T-Mobile doesn’t make you wait. They take your number instead and call you back. Three minutes later, my phone rang. The girl on the other end was friendly, listened to my problem, apologized, and told me she’d send an engineer asap. She couldn’t promise a response before Wednesday due to New Years, so I crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.
Today my comatose phone gave a familiar chirp. T-Mobile had texted me this message:
An Engineer has reviewed your trouble ticket and a resolution has been found. Thank you for choosing T-Mobile.
After making a few calls and dancing around the room, I had to reflect on this. T-Mobile nailed this support experience from the beginning through the middle to the end.
1. I never had to stand in line
Waiting on hold sucks. T-Mobile knows it so they gave me another option and called me back.
2. The agent cared about my problem
The girl on the line was kind, attentive, and apologetic. She made me feel like it was their problem and their responsibility. Which is exactly what I want as a customer. She also promised an update by a specific date, which eased my uncertainty.
3. When the problem was fixed, I heard it from them first
I received a text message as soon as my service was restored. That little victory SMS taught me that when they have downtime in the future, I can trust they will work quickly and notify me when it’s fixed. It’s so frustrating to repeatedly pick up the phone every half hour to see if it works. Thanks to their communication, next time I can relax and wait for the good news.
With one fell swoop of a presentation slide, [Red Hat vice president of support Ian] Gray took the nine-page document that accompanied Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and turned it into a one-page affair meant to simplify a customer’s service experience. “If we ship the bits, we support the bits,” he said. “No more legalese.”
In the old SLA’s place was a “production support scope of coverage.” While technically an SLA, this one-page document now says if Red Hat made it, and it’s production-ready, then Red Hat will support it—no questions asked.
Plus, the company is simplifying support for customers too. It is creating the Red Hat Cooperative Resolution Center to solve problems even when they come from partner products.
In addition, Red Hat created a support center called the Red Hat Cooperative Resolution Center. The center will work to solve issues whether they arrive from Red Hat technology or a partner’s applications, executives said. With this center, Red Hat will take sole ownership of inquiries for any partner’s product that runs on RHEL 5, regardless of whether the problem lies with RHEL 5 or the partner’s product. It’s important to note that Red Hat says it isn’t just covering vendors like Oracle, but all of its partner applications as well. According to Red Hat, its support technicians will accomplish this by working with the support staff of a customer’s vendors to solve a problem.
Kudos to Red Hat for seeing things through their customers’ eyes. Customers don’t care who/what caused the problem, they just want it fixed. When multiple technology providers are involved, it’s nice to know you can count on someone to get it done rather than shift the blame. [tx ED]
[“On Writing” is a new category of SvN post that offers examples of interesting online copy.]
Freshbooks responds to downtime
It’s easy to provide great service when things run smoothly. Handling problem situations is a much tougher — and often more important — test. Freshbooks’ Up and Running blog post is an example of how to do it right.
The company experienced a hardware failure which resulted in downtime and some loss of data. Bad news for sure. But the company’s response, including a detailed explanation and a free upgrade for all accounts, defused the situation and turned a negative into a positive.
Especially nice: the clearly titled sections that explain the problem, what caused it, what they were doing about it, how to tell if you were affected, what to do if your account was affected, and an apology.
For anyone who was inconvenienced by the interruption of service and/or irretrievable data, myself and the entire FreshBooks teams are deeply sorry. I want to extend our thanks to those of you who called and emailed to enquire about the problem. To a person, everyone was polite and understanding, which under the circumstances, was greatly appreciated by myself and the other FreshBooks staff who were hard at work bringing the service back online.
The result? Impressed customers who left raves like these:
Thanks for the open communication and commitment to quick resolution during this ordeal.
I for one greatly appreciate your detailed information, acknowledgement of the problem, and your willingness to provide your clients with some perks to make up for the inconvenience. Outstanding customer service is very hard to come by nowadays. I am a new trial FB user who is now sold, if I wasn’t already!
I appreciate the honesty, dedication and commitment on the part of the FreshBook staff.
Dreamhost’s anatomy of a(n ongoing) disaster
Dreamhost handled a similar rough patch with a long explanation peppered with tongue in cheek images of disaster scenes. The level of detail is impressive though it’s probably a good idea to offer some sort of Cliff Notes version for people who don’t want to read through that much text.
Our number one priority right now is getting this nagging network problem understood and fixed. Once that’s the case, we should be able to put things back in Alchemy, who didn’t lose power on Friday at least. Once things are going good there, we’ll be able to add new servers and transition old ones slowly with little to no downtime.
We’re also going to be buying our own UPSes, since we have learned we can’t trust our data center OR our building to do it. We’ll start by putting the core routers on them, then our internal databases and servers, then our file servers, and finally the hundreds of customer mail, web, and database servers.
