Support Practices and Communication Principles Shared by Qunar Team

Reason

Recently I have seen many cases involving inter‑service support where newcomers handle tasks clumsily, spending a lot of effort without proper results; I share several experiences and concepts to standardize common actions.

Concepts and Logic

First, the mindset should be sincere help rather than bureaucratic posturing; the goal is to get things done, not to show who is superior, and personal gain should be reflected in outcomes, which is especially useful for QA colleagues.

Second, follow basic principles: treat sensitive information carefully and consider public bandwidth when transferring large data.

Third, develop a habit of post‑mortem review and verification to ensure correctness.

Combining mailing lists with QTALK to achieve wide awareness while improving information security and reducing public bandwidth

When a business unit needs to export thousands of user‑related records for promotion, we require the request to be posted to a mailing list; a colleague replies to handle it, processes the data, then sends the result via QTALK to the requester, and finally replies to the email confirming completion.

Share known information even if not directly responsible

In a case where a 400‑phone service from an old provider responded slowly, the lack of comprehensive information about the provider (contacts, contracts) caused increased complaints; the lesson is to promptly share any known details with all relevant colleagues, even if only directional.

Provide complete information to avoid hidden pitfalls

During a group‑buy ticket project, a colleague used a query interface without knowing it was a limited‑usage AV interface that incurs charges; excessive calls caused waste and chaos. The responsible party should strictly warn against misuse.

Provide data in GBK encoding

When product and operations colleagues need data samples or reports for rough analysis, our database outputs UTF‑8; because many non‑technical colleagues use Windows, we convert the file:

cat utf8_data.csv | iconv -c -s -f utf8 -t gbk >gbk_data.csv

This is a considerate practice.

He Weiping

Qunar Travel & Vacation Division – Search technology researcher and database researcher, translator of the first Chinese PostgreSQL manual and the third edition of Programming Perl. Focuses on search, distributed systems, database technology, and cluster design management. Formerly led Yahoo China web search; joined Qunar in 2010, created and developed Qunar guide search and group‑buy channels, now leads the vacation business.