Opening the Door to Greater Customer Success

Closing sales is important. But once the PowerPoint presentations are viewed, purchase orders signed, and promises made – now comes delivery. From the moment new customers engage with our Customer Support team, what we do and say will have lasting impact on the success of our customer’s monitoring project, thus on their business – and (of course) on their relationship with Opsview. It’s critical we get this right!

Luckily, though customers may first become conscious of Support post-sale, we’ve known them for a while by the time contracts are signed. That’s because Opsview’s Sales Engineering and Professional Services Consultants are part of the Customer Success Team -- engaging with customers pre-sale to understand their technology, their needs, and to create POCs (Proofs of Concept) and product demos. This early contact lets us prepare and also, as needed, engage with Opsview Engineering to meet specific customer requirements, like building a custom Opspack or testing a Results Exporter integration with a novel, cloud-based analytics or AI platform. Result: when customers are ready to implement Opsview, we’re ready to hit the ground running.  Some PoC environments even roll right into production, shortening the post-sale time to value even further.

Opsview is typically deployed to monitor critical IT infrastructure and business services. Often, that means services whose availability is guaranteed by strict SLAs, imposing serious financial penalties for downtime. For Opsview to do its job (proactively identifying risks and reducing Mean-Times-To-Repair), we need to do ours: understanding the urgency of customer needs to ensure SLA compliance, making sure Opsview itself works well, and that we resolve any issues quickly and effectively.

The baseline requirement: Opsview support needs to be accessible, responsive, knowledgeable, and efficient. Support can currently be accessed via three channels: phone, email, and via our web-based Customer Portal.  All three “doors” into Opsview are monitored to ensure we respond promptly. Critical issues and outages are best handled via phone, establishing personal engagement, assigning accountability, speeding access to required expertise.

Once lines of communication are established, Customer Success can bring to bear a range of technical tools to understand problems and fix them quickly, hands on. These include customer-enabled screen sharing, as well as secure, customer-per-session-enabled remote command-line access to Opsview components on the customer’s premises.
To speed problem diagnosis, we sometimes need to call on other expertise within Opsview. To manage this efficiently, we’ve engineered an escalation process that can quickly move a ticket from Support to Problem Management, or even into core Engineering. As this takes place, our ticketing system accurately reflects realtime status of our customer’s issue. We also keep the customer verbally updated on what’s happening, and when they can expect resolution.

How do we know we’re getting it right? We ask customers directly. Post-incident surveys help us collect feedback on how well we did the last time our customer needed assistance. And we consistently review these and evolve our best practice to improve results. As an Opsview CS Manager, I’m obviously somewhat biased – still, I’m extremely proud of our Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 91, which is far above industry average.

Thanks to our current customers, whose input we value greatly. And to potential customers: we’re looking forward to helping you become successful with your monitoring solution!