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Within the broader construct of Customer Success, the journey of Customer Support is evolving rapidly. The recent transformation from conventional support to Tiered Support at SolarWinds signifies a paradigm shift in enhancing the customer experience. This transformative approach was designed to ensure that Customer Success took precedence while simultaneously having a positive impact on productivity metrics.
In the past, technical support was delivered to customers in the traditional way. A case was picked up by a rep with a categorization of Low, Medium, High, or System Down. Cases for specific locations (or geos) were typically grabbed by that geo. The model had challenges from a customer perspective, response was slow, and often, our customers would be offline for time zone reasons when the support rep got to the case. This resulted in challenges for retention and expansion within the existing base. Furthermore, from an employee perspective, the career path was limited, and clearly, the customer experience was being compromised.
Customer Support is a critical service that aligns with SolarWinds commitment to ensuring customers have a successful outcome from their observability investment. The introduction of Tiered Support in May 2022, signified a strategic move toward optimizing support services. Metrics such as initial response time (IRT), faster time to resolve (TTR), and overall service quality were identified as key measures of success.
The new Tiered Support structure, as implemented by SolarWinds, involved organizing the support centers into different levels to efficiently handle incoming support issues:
- Tier 1: respond quickly and triage the issue
- Tier 2: work on escalations from Tier 1 and with customers who have selected enhanced support
- Tier 3: deal with our most complex situations
This tiered system facilitates the resolution of complex problems within a smaller, more specialized scope.
By prioritizing customer-centric metrics, SolarWinds aims to leverage data and queueing theory to identify and implement improvements in processes, systems, and staffing that directly impact the customer support experience.
So, how does this transition benefit SolarWinds customers?
- Strategic Customer Support: Directly addresses customer needs, helping ensure a more personalized and efficient resolution of their issues.
- Empowerment through Self-Sufficiency: Providing customers with tools and resources to address common issues independently, empowers them to be self-sufficient, whenever possible.
- Timely Resolution: Establishes a timeline and protocol for complex problems, optimizing key performance indicators and helping ensure a quicker resolution.
- Employee Development and Retention: By offering new roles, certifications, SolarWinds Certified Professional® Bootcamps, and training, Tiered Support opens avenues for career growth, improving employee training, upward mobility, and retention.
- Feedback Mechanism: Allows for regular feedback and suggestions, creating a continuous loop for improvement and development.
- Premium Services: Uplift for a premium support program to meet customer’s mission-critical needs.
Branded as The SolarWinds Advantage and aligned with SolarWinds Customer Support objectives, Tiered Support aims to deliver Customer Success, drive technical excellence, deliver an outstanding experience, increase self-help and Day 1 resolution, and capture and share valuable customer insights.
The next step in the Support Department evolution is Queue ownership, an approach for each geo to service and clear its queue during the assigned timeframe. This is a supplementary approach to tiering, with benefits that will include enhanced accountability for our teams and even faster responses to customers.
Queue Ownership helps ensure that all incoming cases from any queue or tier received from our customers get picked up, responded to quickly, and that every Support Solarian pulls as a team to facilitate this.
The Queue Ownership’s motto is to “Be a good Citizen.”
The transformation undertaken by the Support Department over the last 2 years is indicative of a willingness to evolve, face new challenges head-on, and clearly impact Customer Success. The transformation and success make this group a deserving nominee for Support Department of The Year.
Featured on Channel Asia Tech, Charting Customer success for the aviation industry with SolarWinds
Nomination Title: Transforming Tiered Support to Ensure Customer Success
