Faster Email response times

SoftwareProjects is growing rapidly and as any company experiencing rapid growth, we are going through some "growing pains".

One area we know we have to improve upon, is email response times.

Instant response times used to be one of our key differentiators and we're committed to bringing that back.

In favor of complete transparency, attached is the full copy of an email that was sent today to the dev team:

Subject: New system to monitor & enforce Communication response times

Hi,

We've had a few complaints lately from clients about the time it takes us to -
* Reply to project questions
* Reply to general emails
* Set project deadlines

This new problem needs to be addressed immediately.

The SPI offering has always been positioned as "the Ritz Carlton of Software Development" and it is important we stay true to this core value.

As we continue our massive recruitment efforts, adding new engineers and account managers, opening shops in more locations and bringing in droves of new clients, it is becoming more and more challenging to monitor and maintain our target threshold of how quickly we want to respond to emails, how quickly we want project deadlines to be set etc.

With everyone working on multiple things at the same time, simply asking people to "try and reply to emails and set deadlines as soon as you can", no longer cuts it. It's human nature to intuitively respond to "the easy emails" first and forget about other things, until we are reminded about them by frustrated clients.

Our clients love us and know how much we care about their business. SPI's contribution in helping our clients generate hundreds of millions of dollars is unparalleled in our industry. But not responding to emails as quickly as humanly possible, violates the trust clients place with us.

We need a fully automated system, that will enforce the target SLAs and help all of us meeting and exceeding our customer's expectations. Such a system has been in development for the last few months and will be introduced over the next coming days.

This is a "Carrot & Stick" system, whereby people are compensated for replying to emails within 30 minutes or less, setting a deadline within 6 hours from the time a project is approved etc., and penalized when emails sit around for days without being responded to.

While it is going to take a few days getting used to the new system, I am confident everyone understands the incentive we all share in coming up with a systematic methodology that will help us continue to WOW our clients.

A happy client refers 1 friend to SPI.
An unhappy client tells 5 friends to look elsewhere.

Thank you everyone for your hard work so far. I'm very excited about the big changes ahead as we embark on the second half of 2009.