Unitrends - Customer Service Department of the Year

Company: Unitrends, Burlington, MA
Company Description: Unitrends increases uptime and confidence in a world in which IT professionals must do more with less. Unitrends leverages high-availability hardware and software engineering, cloud economics, enterprise power with consumer-grade design, and customer-obsessed support to natively provide all-in-one enterprise backup and continuity. Learn more at www.unitrends.com or follow @Unitrends on Twitter.
Nomination Category: Customer Service Department Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Hardware

Nomination Title: Unitrends

Tell the story about what this nominated department achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 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:

Unitrends Customer Support Adds IT Resilience with Self-Healing Drives in Recovery Series Backup Appliances and Continues 98% Customer Satisfaction

Unitrends, provider of all-in-one backup and disaster recovery appliances, continues to demonstrate our commitment to delighting customers 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. This year, Unitrends introduced Gen 8 of our Recovery Series backup appliances with new features that eliminate human error and improve overall IT resilience.

New self-healing drives in the Gen 8 appliances reduced drive-related support cases by 80-90%. The drives continuously monitor for behavior anomalies that indicate an imminent mechanical failure and self-heal without disruption. If necessary, the appliance automatically opens a Unitrends support ticket for immediate replacement and notifies the customer that a new drive is on route. It automatically rebuilds the replacement drive into the array without manual intervention, eliminating common sources of human error. We also enhanced the machine-learning based ransomware detection and predictive analytics that detect early indicators of potential issues, enabling pre-emptive correction and IT resilience.

Additionally, career advancement within Unitrends and a rapidly growing customer base created a need to train a several new L1 and L2 support engineers. Our new Unitrends Boot Camp training program ensured new employees meet Unitrends high expectations for service quality.

In 2018, Unitrends also augmented its Customer Champion team, designed for top tier customers with complex environments, with a focus on elite technical account management for large scale, enterprise backup installations.Providing more than just enhanced reactive support, the team takes a proactive approach with scheduled health checks that provide recommendations on environmental impacts, backup strategies, and capacity guidance.The program reduced reactive support cases being generated by over 71%, and increased renewals by 30%.

Key metrics of our improvement this year:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 73
60% Improvement in Average Speed of Answer (ASA) by phone: - reducing answer time from 1: 10 to 42 seconds.
72% Improvement in Average Speed of Answer (ASA) by chat: reducing chat response from 57 seconds to 16 seconds.
22% Improvement in Overall First Call Resolution (FCR) & 72% of all issues resolved within 24 hours.
50% Improvement in Overall Time to Resolution (TTR) cutting average resolution time from 4.6 days to 2.3 days.
2% Improvement in Response SLA from 96% to 98% SLA attainment.
98% Customer Satisfaction: 88% of all customers reporting the highest possible level of overall satisfaction.

Conclusion

Our success is evident in the voice of our customer, like these recent quotes:

-“Unitrends is 10/10 in the industry that just does not get it when it comes to support.”
-“This is the way it's supposed to be. Attentive reps that are well trained and versed on their products are all a customer can ask for. Fast response time and feeling like you know that someone is available for your emergency no matter.”
-“Fastest response to a ticket in the industry. Very knowledgeable technical staff. Awesome performance all-over, easily one of the best customer support out there.”
-“The call came so quickly - I was amazed!!! I really like the super-duper fast response times! I sometimes feel alone with the backups, but it's great to know that I have a team behind me!”
-“Prompt and knowledgeable. I have always had great support from everyone at Unitrends and I recommend the product all the time.”
-“I wish all my hardware/software vendors were as efficient as Unitrends on solving problems!”
-“You guys do EVERYTHING right. You should teach classes on support methodologies to other vendors.”
-“Unitrends has the best support of any vendor I have to deal with and I deal with a lot of them”
-“You have excellent support. Out of all the vendors I have to deal with, your support stands out far beyond the others.”