It is unfortunate, but sometimes a service that we are paying for does not work as expected. Even though agreements have been signed and money has been spent, things go wrong. Sometimes it is out of the control of our service provider—an ISP malfunction, for example. But if an issue keeps happening over and over, you may decide that you need to help them out.
Not receiving data
I have found myself in a situation where the company I was working for had stopped receiving data files critical to the function of the business. The data was ordered on demand and continuous throughout the day. Every time the problem occurred, we had to jump into crisis mode to understand what was going on. It always wound up being an issue with the company that was providing the data, and generally, they were not aware they were having a problem until we reached out to them.
The solution
Since it was impossible to know when data was expected to show up, we looked at the historical data to determine how things customarily flowed. This was not fancy using any machine learning, but simply looking at the files in our archives to see if we could spot a pattern. It jumped out that files were showing up every ten minutes between the hours of 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM on regular business days.
We created a monitor checking the archive location of these data files, and if we did not see a file show up for thirty minutes during a typical business day, we would send an alert.
This did a few things.
- It would alert us that the business was being impacted before they probably knew it.
- The alert would let us know that it wasn’t an issue with our system but with our vendor.
- It allowed us to reach out to the vendor to let them know they were having an issue before they probably even knew about it.
Receiving invalid data
Another recurring issue I have had with a service provider was receiving invalid data. Once again, this happened on several occasions, and also, once again, it was something critical to our business process. The data was in the form of a PDF file. When the issue occurred, we would still get a PDF file, but instead of containing the expected data, it would just be the splash page from our service provider’s website.
Since a data file was provided as expected, no one knew that there was ever an issue until someone needed to retrieve the data. They would also notice that many of the data files were affected. Depending on how long the outage lasted for our vendor.
The solution
It was noticed that the size of the PDF that contained only the splash page was just a few kilobytes, but the size of the PDF that had valid data was several megabytes. So we were able to create a monitor that would check the size of the payload, and if it was small, then send an alert.
Since the business would not even be aware there was an issue until after they went to retrieve a particular data set, this alert allowed us to be even more proactive. Once again, we let our vendor know they were having an issue, usually before they were even aware of it themselves.
We are all in this together
Computers can be temperamental beasts sometimes. All of the issues and problems you have with your systems every day are the same things that everyone else has to deal with.
With the way we are all interconnected with each other, we also have a dependency on one another. With our service providers, we depend on them for their service, and they rely on us to make their living.
It’s easy to holler at our provider when a service that we are paying for malfunctions, and that may be appropriate. Still, if that particular provider is the best fit for you, and you have an otherwise good relationship, the intelligent thing to do may be to help them help you.
If you show a willingness to work with your service provider to make them better, they should be open to your help. You are a paying customer, after all. It can also give you some leverage in getting them to resolve the recurring problem once-and-for-all.
I would love to hear other service provider “opportunities”, and how you have helped resolve them. Please leave a comment below.