Think about the last time you planned a trip. When you scheduled your flight or hotel, did you use a self-service application or website to pick your seat or check into your room, or tap your watch to board the plane? Or did you choose to wait in a queue on the phone or in a line to speak with a human being? If you’re like most people, you used the self-service option. In fact, most service research firms believe that between 80%-90% of all customers attempt to take care of matters themselves before reaching out to a human being for assistance.
This trend has led technology companies to invest significantly in support portals, knowledge bases, communities, and bots all aimed at providing self-service capabilities. While these investments in self-service support capabilities help companies reduce the cost of their support and services teams, we think this trend actually creates several new challenges. For one, the mindset of several support and services organizations has evolved to one of “How do we document this better or provide tools to help the customer solve this issue?” versus a culture of “How do we hold ourselves accountable to provide an effortless experience?”
Relentless Customer Focus
VAST Data’s objective is to provide an effortless customer experience for our ecosystem of consumers. We believe that it is our responsibility to be guardians of your data so that you can focus on the insights and actions that modern applications are able to mine from your data. This is why we have invested in a Co-Pilot program for our Gemini user community.
Every Gemini customer receives an assigned VAST Data Co-Pilot who is a seasoned, technical support veteran accountable for providing always-available access to your VAST Data Platform in an effortless and seamless manner. This means your VAST Data Co-Pilot is focused on not only providing an easy onboarding experience but a personalized, tailored set of tools to assist in the execution and management of daily operations. In alignment with the Gemini program, your Co-Pilot also coordinates and manages all lifecycle services throughout your Gemini solution journey. Ultimately, your Co-Pilot is responsible for your success.
Why the Co-Pilot team?
We are often amazed to hear stories from our customers about how other technology vendors force customers to seek assistance through a complicated network of systems requiring one to read knowledge base articles, answer automated bot questions, and perform trial and error techniques all in the name of proving that there is a “real” issue before being able to even enter a support ticket. Then, the ticket is prioritized and assigned to a level 1 support person who helps them find the right senior technician for their issue. This all takes a LOT of YOUR TIME!
The VAST Data Co-Pilot program bypasses all the complicated self-help tools by enabling our customers to reach out to the Co-Pilot team for expert human assistance on any problem at any time via a private, personalized, Slack channel. More importantly, our Co-Pilots also have access to a direct customer-specific private VAST Data channel for any immediate alerts. This enables the Co-Pilot team to monitor, 24 x 7 x 365, your operations with the intent of either automatically resolving an issue before it happens and/or coordinating proactively with you to mitigate an issue in advance of it becoming an urgent situation. This is all powered by our advanced, industry-leading VAST-Link solution.
Changing the status-quo, VAST Data’s investment in tools like VAST-Link and in the Co-Pilot program enables us to hold ourselves accountable to being guardians of your data. We see ourselves as an extension of your team, an extended team that is focused solely on respecting your time. We believe that it is our responsibility to monitor operations on your behalf, proactively mitigate issues for you, and automate solutions so they never happen again. Ultimately, we believe that your investment in a next-generation storage solution partner should not only be about the technology and self-help tools but also the service you receive from the services and support team.
