Support: North Ridge Reports

A Story about Customer Service

Originally published: Fall 1999

Great Expectations

Our story begins with our customers, who more often than not, run North Ridge Software products in demanding multi-vendor environments, 24-hours a day, 7-days a week. With such stringent requirements, they need technical service that matches or exceeds their expectations. Which is why our policy is to accept ownership for a problem -regardless of its source - from the time a customer reports it, until a satisfactory solution is found.

The plot thickens

A customer installed The Network Center in 1996 and operated it successfully until December of 1998, when they reported the sudden appearance of a problem that was affecting all three of their Vtam systems, including periodic system outages.

North Ridge Software jumped into action and requested a copy of an associated dump. Analysis revealed that The Network Center was acquiring storage in Storage Protect Key zero - an abnormal and potentially dangerous state. We then developed a fix that forced all storage to be acquired in Storage Protect Key six. Our customers production systems ran successfully once again.

Meanwhile, IBM had initiated an error report. Their analysis proved inconclusive until one of their international customers reported a similar problem: A third party vendor's software package was returning to Vtam in Storage Protect Key zero. A check with our customer indicated that they had indeed installed the same software about a week before their initial symptoms occurred. Not only did we alert our customer to this problem; we also supplied them with a fix forwarded to us by IBM.

The brilliant conclusion

In total, we pursued the problem for five months. During that time, we retained ownership for the problem until it was correctly resolved - even after discovering that we were not responsible.

The moral of the story

We want to assure you that you can expect the same level of service: We are committed to our customers! Please don't hesitate to contact us; not only are we happy to help you, but we actually will help you. And you don't hear that from software vendors too often. . .