Transparency and trust: The vital role of service provider status pages
NetDocuments is in the business of trust. We securely store and deliver content services for our global customers 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. Every consumer has expectations that their product partners are honest. The NetDocuments team believes honesty and transparency are two sides of the same coin.
One unwavering promise we make to our customers: NetDocuments service is available when they need it. Our service status pages present real-time service health and performance. Each global region has a dedicated page to allow customers to focus on regions relevant to their business. Gone are the days when downtime was something software companies kept secret.
The services status pages show platform responsiveness and availability. Take for example the service response time and total transaction volume for the US service shown below. The response time metric measures user experience across all tenants of the service using NetDocuments Web or Office™ integration products. This metric provides a handy way to determine if the service is responding reasonably. NetDocuments generates internal operations system alerts for any 5-minute period with the average response time over 570ms.
The Transactions metric aggregates platform activities ranging from searches (700+ per second) to document uploads (6-8M per day) to API calls (30K per hour). Utilities and custom applications are not reflected in the transaction metric.
Adopting a Culture of Transparency
Gone are the days when downtime was something you kept hush hush. Customers expect transparency. In fact, a paradox exists that show the psychological impact technology has on a business. Called Service Recovery Paradox, it defines a scenario where a customer thinks more highly of a company after the company has corrected a problem with their service, compared to how they regarded the company if non-faulty service had been provided.
An analysis of industry trends shows one thing: industry leading platforms have service status pages. We looked at a range of companies over various markets and industries. Within the legal industry, we focused primarily on companies recognized by the ILTA technology survey. We classified them into categories such as content services (manage documents), financial, industry (focused on specific solutions like Zendesk, GoToMeeting, etc.), platform (Microsoft, AWS, Apple, Google, Facebook), practice management (Elite, Clio, LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters). The survey shows that most legal service vendors do not meet industry standards for status reporting. How does your product partner stack-up?
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