IBM Netezza
Company: IBM Netezza
Company Description: IBM Netezza is the global leader in data warehouse and analytic appliances that dramatically simplify high-performance analytics for business users across the extended enterprise, delivering significant competitive and operational advantage in today’s information-intensive marketplaces.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Executive of the Year
Nomination Title: Patricia Cotter, VP Worldwide Operations
Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since January 1 2010 (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:
On July 23, 2009, Netezza CEO Jim Baum promoted Patricia Cotter to Senior Vice President of Operations (Customer Support and Manufacturing). Part of Baum’s announcement stated, “We’ve never missed a shipment, our customers are highly satisfied, we are winning awards for the quality of our support, we have consistently lowered the cost of our goods sold, and I am pretty sure that
‘great service’ is Trish’s middle name.”
‘Great service’ indeed!
For the past three years, IBM Netezza Customer Support has fired on all
cylinders – excelling at both support delivery to an enterprise customer base
that doubled in size and operational excellence, resulting in industry leading
key business metrics performance.
Customer Satisfaction 98%
Net Promoter/Loyalty 53%
Support Gross Margin% 75%
Contract Renewal Rate 96%
Never satisfied, Cotter’s support organization turned to advanced support
technology in 2010 to further optimize support delivery and effectively scale
operations.
Coveo advanced search and dashboard technology was implemented in May. Coveo’s
unified view of 9 key data repositories drove immediate improvements – reducing
the time to identify known problems by 67%, and driving bug submission quality
improvements that resulted in an 85% increase in Customer software problems
resolved. Within 8 months Customer Support was running the most advanced
instance of Coveo on the planet, and implemented Coveo’s first Customer 360
Degree Dashboard.
Coveo’s 360 Degree Account provides both active and historic views of customer
activity that is viewable from a wide range of centricities or combination of
centricities by simply choosing from a large selection of filters. Status or
trends can be viewed from the perspective of the account, account status,
country, support engineer, technical account manager, bug escalation, incident
impact, incident priority, incident type, software revision, and system model.
Live index change tracking lets everyone from support engineers to the CEO know
within five minutes when an account status changes, and why it changed.
Reporting that took hours or days to produce can now be done in minutes or
seconds; or completely eliminated – is there really a need for reporting if you
can see results on a near real time dashboard?
Support implemented ISOdx change isolation forensics technology in September,
and immediately reduced the time it took to identify software changes that cause
problems in Linux Hosts from hours, days, and (sometimes) weeks to minutes.
Our customers have not experienced a protracted host outage since ISOdx was
implemented, support engineers can now quickly identify 99% of software changes
made outside of the database, and host hardware problem validation has increased
to 100% - if ISOdx cannot find the problem, it’s a hardware problem.
Support is effectively leveraging the advanced support technologies of tomorrow
to optimize support delivery today, and laying the groundwork for continual
improvement going forward – and in the process, proving that no matter how well
you are doing, you can always find ways to improve.
Strong leadership drives strong results. Nowhere was the impact of Cotter’s
leadership more evident than in the customer feedback from Netezza’s last
Relationship Survey of high level Netezza customer contacts. 77% of the
contacts said that Netezza was better than any other data warehousing company
that they had done business with – 59% of the comments on the survey stated that
Support was the reason Netezza was better.
List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:
http://www.coveo.com/en/customers/netezza-ep3
http://www.coveo.com/en/customers/netezza-ep1
http://www.coveo.com/en/customers/netezza-ep2
http://www.netezza.com
http://www.netezza.com/videos/customer-support-experiences.aspx
http://www.netezza.com/support/summit_video.html
Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the nominee:
Patricia Cotter joined Netezza in 2002 as Vice President of Customer Support and
Manufacturing, and is the only women senior vice president at Netezza. While
Netezza engineers developed the world’s first data warehouse appliance system,
Cotter built a support infrastructure and forged manufacturing, supply chain,
and service partnerships that enabled Netezza to bring their first system to
market in September, 2002 – creating a new blueprint for start-up companies
manufacturing, delivering, and supporting complex systems. She has a BA from
Boston College, MBA from Northeastern University, and is an AMP graduate of
Harvard Business School.