Company: Virtela, Greenwood Village, CO
Entry Submitted By: Greenough
Company Description: Virtela Technology Services Incorporated is the smart alternative to traditional global carriers and equipment vendors for enterprise networking and virtualized IT services. The company delivers award-winning services via its Virtualized Overlay Network and Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC) platform, which enables the transition of branch office networking and security services to the cloud.
Nomination Category: Support Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Support Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Virtela's Support Team Continues to Create New Standards for Itself and the Industry

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since January 1 2012 (up to 525 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:

“A customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him. He is not an interruption of our work. He is the purpose of it. He is not an outsider to our business. He is part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him. He is doing us a favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.”
 
This quote, uttered by Mahatma Gandhi in 1890, is something Virtela, the world's largest independent managed network, security and cloud services provider, lives by day in and day out. Simply put, Virtela is passionate about support. A company that is driving cloud IT innovation, Virtela maintains a customer support model unlike that of other service providers. 
 
Virtela’s support team consists of three Global Operation Centers (GOCs) staffed 24x7 by network engineering/IT experts who proactively monitor, inspect, detect and analyze customer networks and IT infrastructure. The support team’s mission is to ensure the highest uptime and satisfaction, and their success is evident:
 
“We are on a first-name basis with the support team from Virtela. I consider that a true partnership and see Virtela as a seamless extension of our IT organization.” -- Dennis Hodges, CIO, Inteva Products.

Year after year, Virtela’s support team creates new standards for itself as well as the industry. And, each year, Virtela dramatically outperforms these service guarantees, pushing the envelope for customer service excellence:
 
In 2012, Virtela's support team improved the speed to answer customer calls by 50 percent, answering first calls within an average of 6.4 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2011. This is compared to industry norms of hours or even days. Virtela opened 99 percent of trouble tickets proactively and resolved 95 percent of issues on the first call. And, the company continued to outperform its aggressive 4-hour global guarantee for mean time to restore, averaging just 53.4 minutes.
 
97 percent of customer survey respondents in 2012 said they were highly satisfied or satisfied with the courtesy of the Virtela technical operations staff, and 95 percent were highly satisfied or satisfied with Virtela's resolution of their issues.
 
“When you’re a Virtela customer, you feel like you’re their only customer. I can send an email at 3am in the morning to the CEO and I know I will get a response within 30 minutes. If we went with one of the legacy service providers, we wouldn’t have that capability, which is critical for a growing company that’s facing challenges globally—in bringing up new offices and keeping them operating.” – Chris Jones, CTO, Shaklee Corporation 
 
Virtela boasts a real-time, predictive-based proactive support model which enables the support team to notify customers of issues before they’re even aware of them, 99 percent of the time -- and resolve 95 percent of issues before they impact network health. 
 
All of Virtela’s services are backed by 24x7 follow-the-sun support – driven entirely by its global support team. Virtela has been recognized by more than 50 awards for outstanding service innovation/customer support in the last two years alone, and its support team continues to make customer experience its number one priority. 

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Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:

Ted Studwell, Vice President of Engineering and Operations, is responsible for delivering expertly designed networks and services to Virtela customers including responsibility for the company's 24x7 Global Operations Centers. Prior to Virtela, Ted led the planning and engineering of data networks for Qwest and Sprint. Before joining Sprint, Ted worked in communications systems at Aeronautical Radio, COMSAT and General Electric. He has served the U.S. Navy in active and reserve capacities as a submarine officer for over 25 years, achieving the rank of Captain.

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