Giving our customers the day-to-day service they expect – as well as delivering a complete technical solution – is a huge part of what we do, but often don’t talk about. But today that’s all changing; let’s grab some thoughts from our Operations Manager, Iain Statham.
Being Who We Want To Be
As the Operations Manager at whitesky.cloud, I sit right in between the technical and commercial sides of the business. This means I get a pretty unique view of the work we’re doing. The issue I’ve seen with other cloud providers is that their customer support and technical backup are often lacking. That’s something that, especially as a smaller provider, you just can’t have.
Understanding what our customers are trying to achieve is a big part of how we deliver our service. For many of them, they’re reselling a white-label version of our platform to other businesses who want to build digital products. Those businesses need to be able to focus on exactly that, not worrying about deploying and scaling their resources.
Whether they’re in Mexico, Mauritius, or Monaco; everything we do is based on customer service – and the fact we enable high-quality, risk-free products to be engineered with very low startup costs. We take away all their development and setup fees. The way we compete with the hyperscalers is by offering the best customer service and technical support.
We’re at the size now where I’m actively reviewing our onboarding processes. This means I’m now updating our documentation and knowledge base so that it matches what our customers truly need. We don’t want to be a hyperscaler, but we do want to maintain our service as we grow.
It’s unlikely you’ll know what your business will be doing in 5 years’ time. So you need a solution that can move with you. A perfect example is how unattached we all are to our OSs. All that matters for most users is having fast connections to the apps that serve their needs. It’s the same with cloud computing.
What appeals to me is to be able to offer a high-quality product that can be branded in a way that our customers can push out as their own. I want our VCOs and cloud operators to have a better value product and more immediate customer service than they can get elsewhere. That they know who we are, rather than us just being a faceless support desk.
Honesty Is Key
I personally deal with many of our customers on a regular basis and whenever we interact I always try to be transparent about issues and their fixes. We have SLAs with our VCOs and down the line, they have them with their own customers. Those SLAs are a key part of good customer management. They’re a pledge of what we want to deliver. We take them seriously because we want to match our promise but also they give our customers a realistic view of service.
There is no such thing as 0% downtime. It doesn’t matter if you’re a tiny provider or one of the hyperscalers – there are always outages. They could be related to maintenance, ISPs, hardware failure, or any number of other factors. Being clear with customers at the start of, and during a relationship is crucial to take away the pain of downtime.
Most often it’s an external issue that is causing a problem but in those cases, we still take our part in the fix seriously. We can dial into everything and we’re on first-name terms with 50 different ISPs managing the connections into our data centers – so we’ll push for fixes at every turn.
I’m proud of the work my team does and they’re some of the best and brightest in the industry. Most importantly I’m excited to see where we are in a few years, making sure at every step that we stay true to who we want to be.
Want to work with great people like Iain? Get in touch with whitesky.cloud now.
