8 Reasons Webscale’s Support Team Delights Customers

“Webscale’s support team has been fantastic and often we are notified by Webscale staff about a problem before we have even become aware there is an issue.”

— Owen Wald, Chief Marketing Officer at US Water Systems, Inc.,
Webscale customer

Earlier this year, Webscale won the Stevie Award in the Customer Service Department of the Year category. Last year, we achieved an industry-leading Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 71 from our customers – nearly three times the B2B industry average.

We’ve helped hundreds of online merchants rapidly migrate their storefronts to the public cloud, while making their businesses more successful, scalable, and secure. While e-commerce businesses move to Webscale to achieve 100% uptime, powerful security, and high performance, as well as more control and comprehensive visibility into their infrastructure, they stay with us because of awesome customer support.

So, how is Webscale’s customer support light years ahead of other e-commerce cloud hosting providers?

Customer support that’s accessible 24x7x365 just doesn’t cut it anymore. Almost everyone offers that. And so do we.

We excel because delivering no matter what is core to everything we do at Webscale. With a single-minded customer focus – one that goes beyond mere technical issue resolution – we help our customers achieve their business goals.

Here are eight reasons our support team delights customers:

1. Aggressive, stringent SLAs: Our response time SLA for critical tickets is 30 minutes. Our internal target, however, is much more aggressive at 15 minutes, and our average response time is around 10 minutes, during any time of the day! Our customers know that if they send us a critical ticket, we’ll be there for them, no matter what.Also, in addition to email and phone, we support our customers through Slack. All customers on Webscale Enterprise plans have a dedicated Slack channel open for them to chat with us any time, so when they submit a ticket, we can have a real-time conversation with them (often including their development partners) while resolving the issue.
2. Proactive monitoring and issue resolution: We do a lot of proactive monitoring as we follow an “automate and monitor everything” approach. We monitor for symptoms that are predictive of larger issues that could happen if left unchecked. This allows us to get ahead of issues before they happen. As a result, we get more internal alerts than customer-initiated ones.Almost every time we get a critical case from a customer, we’ve already received an internal alert and are looking into the issue before the customer notifies us. Our proactive monitoring not only provides us insights into the customer’s environment, but also gives us a head start that helps us resolve most issues in record time.The combination of our unique automation features and our powerful predictive analytics engine, effectively render the Webscale product suite a Level 0 support agent, where fixes can be automatically applied before a customer site’s performance or availability are impacted, preventing service disruptions.
3. Tools and technology: The traffic viewer section of our web-based visibility portal provides granular insights into our customers’ site traffic. The ongoing analysis of this data helps us to troubleshoot and narrow down issues very quickly.Here’s a simple example. If a site goes down and our traffic viewer has identified a spike in traffic, we can narrow down the source to a specific IP address that may have started hitting the site and overloaded the database. We can then add the IP to a block list and get the site back up.The event log section of our portal is another key tool we use for identifying the root cause. Our tools and automation capture customer-specific environment events as well as user actions within the environment for a documented history log that everyone can see and use to correlate to point-in-time issues.We also have a knowledge library for all our standard operating procedures (SOPs). When someone on the team solves an unusual issue, he/she creates an SOP, so that the next time the issue appears, we can solve it much more efficiently.
4. Triage of support: We’ve taken the traditional triage of support and flipped it on its head. Our triage starts with Level 3 support (as opposed to Level 1). When a customer raises a support ticket, our most qualified and experienced people look at it first, whether it’s a new request or a follow-up.These triage support team members do some quick initial screening and troubleshooting, and then assign the case to the right person based on the nature and complexity of the issue. This is extremely efficient and leads to significantly faster problem resolution with less back-and-forth with the customer.
5. Triangle of support: We create a triangle of support with the customer at the tip, web developer (or development partner) in one corner, and Webscale at the other – each of us working to address any issues that come up, as soon as they come up.We set up dedicated communication channels with development partners, while keeping the customer informed. We also have a separate customer channel for three-way communication, but if it’s purely a code-based issue, the partner channel allows us to resolve issues quickly without having to trouble the customer.
6. Hiring: When we hire, we look for people that fit into our team-based culture. We look for people that value teamwork, because when a critical issue comes up, often several members of the team get involved to resolve it as quickly as possible. Relentless customer focus, teamwork, and great communication (external AND internal) are really important to us.
7. Rewards, recognition, and additional responsibilities: We have a quarterly Webscale Superstar Award, which recognizes team members that go above and beyond to solve customer issues.Our team is also rewarded for figuring out ways to automate and simplify processes, in addition to regular support tasks. They can build tools for support, monitoring, and troubleshooting – anything that makes us more efficient.
8. Culture: We’re essentially a team that’s willing to do whatever it takes to make customers successful. Everyone in the team is really invested in their work, which no one thinks of as a 9 – 5! This culture is what makes Webscale’s support team a truly world-class organization, and one that leads the industry in its depth of knowledge around successfully delivering e-commerce storefronts in the public cloud.

Sub-par support from your cloud hosting provider is NOT OK! To feel the difference, sign up with Webscale. Fill out this form or email us at sales@webscalenetworks.com to get started.