Unitrends is the … of the Backup World

“Unitrends is the … of the backup world.  They are the friendliest, over-the-top, happiest people”

[Jay P.]

Got another great quote from a customer(1).  This was sent over to me by Jenn Rast, who is is our customer relationship management leader.

I really liked this because the other day I had a terrible support experience with a consumer electronics company who sells an all-in-one DVR.   I love their product – when it works – but I want to shoot myself every time I have to talk to their support.  It’s torture – and I’m pretty  sure that the folks working in this DVR’s support group see their jobs as torture as well.

At Unitrends, every day I read every comment that customers make after contacting our support group.  And I’m not alone.  So does Dan Wixon, our leader of worldwide support.   So does Doug Crummy, our leader of L1 technical support and David McCraw, our leader of L2 technical support.  So does Sameer Kamat, our leader of physical appliance product management, and Maria Pressley, our leader of virtual appliance (Unitrends Enterprise Backup(TM) product management.  And so on…  We talk about customer support monthly at every one of our board meetings.  There’s no other word for it – customer support is strategic at this company.

But beyond this kind of attention, there are three fundamental reasons that Unitrends has the highest customer support ratings in the industry:

• People: If you expect the best, you hire the best.  And then you incent those people to delight customers.  Period.
• Process: We’ve got elaborate processes that have been created to delight customers.  Is it perfect.  No.  In fact, we recently hired Dan Wixon in part to help us re-engineer these processes.  What we found in 2012, which I’ve called out before, is that due to a great deal of growth our customer satisfaction rating dropped from 99% to as low as 96%.  In our business, which is driven by customers referencing Unitrends to other customers, 96% is simply not good enough.  Fortunately, the support team in the last quarter of 2012 and onward into 2013 have driven that customer satisfaction rating dramatically higher.
• Technology:  Our all-in-one vertical integration gives us a decided edge here as does our proactive monitoring of our appliances (possible because of the all-in-one vertical integration.)

Again – I always stress this – we’re not perfect.  In the last month or two we’ve introduced the concept of customers being able to self-escalate issues – we get 1-2 a week – and of course, a customer who feels that they have to escalate means we didn’t solve the core issues fast enough.  And we’re maniacs about reading customer feedback – because a couple of times a month we catch unhappy customers and work to reconcile the issues.

Thanks to Jay for taking the time to send us this feedback.  And of course – thanks to all of our customers.

(1) The precise quote was modified from an earlier version of this blog post – the reason is that it (a) referenced by name a non-technology company – and since we hid the name of the DVR company in the body, the least I could do is stay consistent and (b) referenced a company that for some/many continues to be controversial.  Thanks for the folks who wrote in to let us know.