On the call we had a member of the client’s IT staff (at the corporate office), a member of Dakim’s support staff (on-site at the client location, which is not the corporate office), myself, and two different members of Secure Computing’s Sidewinder support team. (The first one’s shift ended, and he transferred us to a different tech.)

Let me say first off that I was TREMENDOUSLY impressed with Sidewinder’s support. (I hadn’t been familiar with their products before this.) Both techs were ninjas, and we started speaking with them after about 30 seconds in the hold queue.

After we’d been on the call for a while, we were able to rule out Sidewinder as a part of the problem, and the Sidewinder tech got off the call — and a short while later, we ruled out Dakim’s [m]Power and Dakim’s servers as part of the problem — it was a problem with the client’s network config. We stayed on the phone with them and on-site, troubleshooting until we were able to diagnose the issue and tell the client exactly where the problem was.

This was absolutely a money-loser for Dakim, and economically a bad decision — between the remote tech and myself and drive time, this cost Dakim between 12 and 14 person-hours, for a problem that turned out not be our responsibility at all — but I really like working for a company that provides that kind of customer service. There wasn’t anybody looking at us and tapping their watches — from the CEO down we know the costs of this kind of support, and we still want to provide it. I feel good about that.