I go to school. There are always more things to learn, and until I know them all, I plan on continuing to go to school. It does get a bit difficult to schedule at times, but it is good to get a new perspective and to keep in touch with the learning experience. Too often, CEOs of companies become complacent and begin to think that they know everything. An MBA program professor once told me that the most common trait of successful businesses is to recognize their mistakes. Recently at B2BGateway we have recognized that our biggest mistake has been a decline in customer service.

It appears that you do a great job and organizations want your services. As Malcolm Gladwell identifies in his book "The Tipping Point", there comes a point where an increase in business can cause you to no longer provide the best possible service. We believe we have recently reached a tipping point at B2BGateway, but we have a plan in place to correct the situation. We sincerely apologize to our clients who have valued our extraordinary level of customer service over the years, and we want them to know that we will soon be back on track.

After careful examination we found that our Support Engineering (SE) staff was pulled in several different counter-productive directions. Not only is the SE responsible for all client contact, but they are responsible for setups of new trading partner implementations as well as for day to day maintenance. We have found that if there are frequent maintenance issues (trading partner issues, client issues or mapping issues), setups can be delayed. Naturally the day to day issues of a live EDI relationship take precedence over a setup.

Phase 1 of correcting this flaw in our system is accomplished by increasing the levels of support that will be provided to our customer base. Your Support Engineer will still be responsible for all contact and management of your EDI project, but now they will have a setup team at their disposal. The Support Engineers will also have our new Rapid Response Team to assist with production issues that may arise. Yes, you can always go through your Support Engineer for production issues, but you can also self-submit routine issues to the Rapid Response team.

The Rapid Response Team will provide you with feedback and notes when a task is claimed by the team. Updates are automatically generated each time the status of the task is changed and if it is assigned to a different group, (Setup, Setup Programming, Maintenance Programming, etc.) for resolution. We hope that this will resolve the questions that our clients have had regarding the status of an open task.

Phase 2 of our corrective measures is to provide more feedback to our clients regarding the progress of new trading partner relationships. We have found that most of the time our clients assume that if they have not heard the status of a setup or a maintenance task, then it hasn't been worked on. That is almost never the case, but we are wrong for not letting our clients know the status of the projects.

Just like going to school is a continued learning process, at B2BGateway we are listening and learning from our clients on how to provide better service. We hope that adding these support teams to your existing SE team, we will once again provide the best service at the best value. I look forward to your feedback on this new system, please visit your RRT support page inside the Client Portal to provide feedback. Thank you.