Last January 16th, Funio took over the domain management systems, hosting infrastructures and customer service. Today, this transition which is not always very easy, is ongoing. We have faced many challenges in the last month, but our team has dedicated itself to the task and has been able to catch up with the accumulated lateness that was due to a high volume of requests. We see today that our efforts have borne fruit
Here is a series of 3 articles (on 3 days) that include a Post-mortem of the last month’s activities, as well as a descriptive of certain projects on which we will continue to work on in the next few weeks. Your comments are appreciated and will help us take the right decisions.
Our internal Systems
1. Post-Mortem on the new domain management interface
Last January 16th, we have put many new systems into place including our new domain name management interface. The goal was to replace the old iWebReservation.com interface by one that would be more modern, simple and user-friendly, while connecting to our new partner. This new interface should possess the same functionalities that the old interface had, and have solid foundations to ensure that we can add new functionalities in the future. That is what we have achieved.
However, changing providers meant changing partners (registrar) for every domain renewal. We knew this procedure would need to be made manually, but we have underestimated the workload that this process would generate as well as the popularity of the new interface. Result: we had to execute several thousands of manual processes to ensure that the domains are transferred from the old partner to the new one. Furthermore, althought many tests were performed on the new system before the official launch, certain differences between our old partner’s systems and the new one have created additional manual interventions. Evidently, whoever says manual interventions means a higher error risk, which we have very well managed.
In brief, the volume of additional requests and manual interventions resulted in additional delays in answers and treatment of the requests. As we write these lines, we have caught up with most of the backlog and estimate that we will respond within normal delays by the end of next week.
2. Projects for the new domain name management interface.
The next improvement step consists of automating the vast majority of the operations that are currently performed manually, which will greatly accelerate treatment delays, as well as allow us to concentrate our team’s efforts on our customers’ requests. At the same time, we are correcting certain comptability errors between our partners’ systems that we had not noticed during our testing period before the launch, which will allow our customers to take a greater control directly through the domain name management interface without waiting for the intervention of the Funio team. We estimate that this development step will be completed by the end of March.
Further on, we will begin a standardisation stage of our interfaces (customer Hub vs support requests vs domain management vs Panelbox) as well as adding new functionalities to our domain management. These additions will allow a simplified use of the interfaces, provide more control to our customers and improve the level of support offered.
Two other articles will come out in the next few days:
1 – Post-Mortem and infrastructure improvements
2 – Post-Mortem and customers service improvements
