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
- Which will you submit for your nomination in this category, a video of up to five (5) minutes, explaining the achievements since July 1, 2021 of the nominated department, OR written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
Total 247 words used.
Many of our customer case studies mention the excellence of the Unitrends customer support team’s response to security and ransomware events. We are highlighting these two for this year’s entry:
We also wanted to include select quotes from our customer surveys. Many customers mention our support team’s knowledge, attitudes, speed of response, attention to security measures, and professionalism. Additionally, many customers are so thrilled with their service that they mention their technician by name.
Select customer quotes from support case surveys:
- Great service! André really helped with this emergency recovery while I was freaking out.
- Brandon was extremely knowledgeable, proficient, and professional. It is always an absolute pleasure when dealing with professionals like him when needing critical support. A++++ 5 stars!
- Charles was knowledgeable and patient. After ransomware attack on 6 virtual servers I was back up and running within 24 hours. Excellent!!
- Justin was very knowledgeable and was extremely fast at helping me resolve the issue I was having. I couldn't dream of getting better service than this.
- Vincent was thorough and quickly replied to all of my questions. Really made fixing my issue a joy!
- We were really in a bind that time thanks for going out of your way (all tech's involved) to help us with this restore issue!
- Very happy with speed and accuracy of support. We were able to quickly go through the restore steps and complete the restore in less than 15 minutes.
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video. If you are submitting written answers to the questions for this category, provide them in the spaces below.
- Outline the department's achievements since July 1 2021 that you wish to bring to the judges' attention (up to 250 words):
Total 246 words used.
Key data points:
- 98% CSAT attainment
- 97% initial response Service Level Agreement (SLA) attainment
- Full support coverage 24/7/365 + holidays via phone, email, chat and online support portal for all customers. Anytime, anywhere, any way you choose.
Customer support team accomplishments:
- Customer support management implemented new “Code Red” phone lines for emergency disaster recovery and urgent restore requests.
- The management team also launched a new process that provides direct access to L2 engineers for Unitrends certified partners and customers.
- The team performed an average of 38 Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS) recoveries per month. During a DRaaS recovery, our team moves data and applications protected by Unitrends hardware to the Unitrends Cloud so our customers can keep operating during an outage. The average 38 monthly recoveries include services for both actual disaster declaration events, a time when customer service is of the utmost importance, and testing events to ensure SLAs and BC/DR goals can be met. Our customer service department is held to an SLA of either 1-hour or 24-hours for server spin-up and the department responds to DRaaS events 24/7/365.
- The hardware customer support department also expanded support reliability and scalability through broadened geo-support coverage with the addition of a new support location in Dundalk, Ireland.
New product support, with a focus on security:
- Secure Agent Pairing support
- Local access lockdown support
- Improved security posture through Immutable Cloud Backups and secure data protection process
- Addition of VMware 8.0 support
- Support for new generation 10 backup appliances
- Briefly describe the nominated department: its history and past performance (up to 200 words):
Total 194 words used.
Unitrends, a Kaseya company, has been in the business of making backup and recovery as hassle-free as possible for over 34 years. From the beginning, Unitrends’ mission has included expert customer support that exceeds both industry benchmarks and customer expectations. As our solutions have grown from a simple backup appliance to an integrated BC/DR solution, customer support satisfaction rates (CSAT) have remained a priority. The department has maintained CSAT at 98% or higher over the years. Weekly CSAT reports and KPIs are reviewed by our executive team, ensuring a high standard.
Recent history includes the 2022 Kaseya acquisition of Datto, another leading provider of backup appliances. In 2023, continued efforts to standardize services across Kaseya brands have led to improved processes within the Unitrends hardware customer support team (details in the following sections). As the Datto and Unitrends teams worked together to improve processes for all customers, our support staff remained committed to our high service standards and ensured that organizational changes did not lead to reduced service levels or lower CSAT rates. Customers who report anything less than satisfied receive friendly follow-up from our team to ensure their needs and expectations are met.
- Explain why the achievements you have highlighted are unique or significant. If possible compare the achievements to the performance of other players in your industry and/or to the department's past performance (up to 250 words):
Total 249 words used.
While many tech companies see support as the first place to cut costs, we see our excellent support team as a key part of our value proposition. During this award period, we improved our hardware troubleshooting by investing in more robust support tools. These new tools provided more detailed hardware troubleshooting data and resulted in improved accuracy in our warranty processing, which is handled by our support team. With our new partnership with Datto, we standardized our appliance manufacturing process through our in-house hardware team, leading to faster warranty processing timelines. We've also released better hardware reporting through our centralized management platform, UniView, which gives our technicians better insight when handling cases.
Additionally, we just launched the new generation 10 version of Unitrends’ cornerstone product, all-in-one Recovery Series backup appliances. Our hardware customer support team involved key staff in the launch planning and customer-facing materials review and provided training to the entire team to prepare technicians for the increased demand on services. Recovery Series hardware appliances are Unitrends’ most popular product, and this line is known for reliability—so much so that customers often rely on these backup appliances for many years. This puts Unitrends hardware customer support in the position of supporting multiple feature sets at once. Our customer support team has worked to maintain their extensive product knowledge and to be ready to help no matter who calls. Despite the many departmental and product changes in the last award period, our CSTA has remained at an industry-leading 98%.
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