TSANet offers members the opportunity to showcase their company’s customer support organization. The latest company in the “Member Spotlight” series is Veeam.
TSANet interviewed Ben Milligan, Director, Customer Technical Support at Veeam.
About Veeam
Veeam, founded in 2006, is the innovative provider of solutions that deliver Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™, business that must operate 24/7/365. Their main products include Veeam® Backup & Replication™, Veeam® ONE™ , Veeam® Management Pack™ (MP), and Veeam® Endpoint Backup™. Veeam Backup & Replication provides recovery of virtualized applications and data bringing virtual machine backup and replication together in a single software solution. Veeam ONE is a monitoring, reporting and capacity planning tool for the Veeam backup infrastructure and vSphere and Hyper-V virtual environments. Veeam Management Pack (MP) is a comprehensive System Center extension for managing and monitoring vSphere and Hyper-V management and Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam Endpoint Backup is a free product that provides a simple solution for backing up Windows-based desktops and laptops. Click here to learn more about Veeam products.
Headquartered in Baar, Switzerland, Veeam has Support centers located in Columbus, Ohio, Sydney Australia and St. Petersburg, Russia. Veeam provide support for the following languages: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Dutch, and Russian. Veeam is starting to expand their support locations and languages based on customer growth.
Veeam Support
Veeam support programs include Evaluation, Basic and Production Support. Evaluation Support program provides 8×5 support for a period of 60 days for customers evaluating their software. Basic Support program provides 8×5 support and includes upgrades and updates to the products. Production Support programs provides 24/7 software support and fast response times for critical issues.
Their support department has 240 engineers/managers, providing 3 tiers of support. Tier 1 team handles all the first contact on cases, and they resolve 90% of ticket volume. Tier 2 team that handles 8-9 % of ticket volume. Tier 3 team works directly with Q&A and R&D on code level issues, and they handle less than 1% of ticket volume. Veeam also have regional SWAT teams that work with customers on high severity cases for their backup products.
They also offer a customer support portal that offers a knowledge base, technical documents, case creation, case management, management of licenses and more. Veeam’s support team work customer incidents through phone, WebEx, email, and their Twitter account. Click here to view Veeam’s Support Policy.
Veeam Training
The onboarding program for a new support engineer is 4 weeks of intense lab based training. The training includes building and working on servers within vSphere lab, working within Hyper-V and VMware to build Microsoft and Linux servers, installing their products, shadowing on calls and cases, and live training with a dedicated engineer. Veeam’s training program also includes a review process every week to check on progress. Once they are on the floor, they have team leads that continue on-the-floor training and coaching. According to Ben, their training is very fast paced but very regimented and consistent.
When hiring engineers, they look for technical skills such as experience working in a technical call center. Another skill they look for is their interest in technology and ability to learn new products. Right now Veeam is in a major growth phase and they are recruiting engineers constantly.
Multi Vendor Support
Veeam has been a dedicated member of TSANet for 8 years. Prior to joining TSANet, Veeam would reach directly to the vendor through the partnership program to resolve multi vendor support issues. The engagements were manual and were created through the alliances or technical partnership that was not initiated by support. After joining TSANet, their engagement mechanism helped map it all together. Veeam first used TSANet to collaborate with VMware only. Once they expanded their product base and realized their products integrated with other vendors, they upgraded their membership from Limited to Basic. Now they have direct contact with multiple members such as NetApp and Riverbed. According to Ben, TSANet provides easy engagement from vendor to vendor.
Veeam Best Practices
Veeam’s most important metric when rating their engineers is customer satisfaction. Their bonus programs are heavily weighted on customer satisfaction. Veeam’s net promoter score is 62%, and their support department has improved in every category. Another best practice is they survey every case. Their survey response rate is 37%. They also utilize Twitter to engage with customers and handle support issues.
They are currently piloting chat inside of their customer portal in the Americas region. Veeam is also in the process of piloting a reply rating so customers have the ability to leave a rating on any email they receive from engineers. This way they can ensure they have quality answers from their engineers.
Veeam has co-located their support and development teams to provide fast response times and knowledge transfer. The ability for the teams to interface directly with each other, allows them to solve problems fast and provide customer input to the development process. “Even though we have grown quite a bit, we have tremendous agility based on the hierarchy and the proximity of the way our teams are built. Agility is what makes us strong from a support perspective,” said Ben.
We would like to thank Ben Milligan and Veeam for their support and participation as a Basic Member of TSANet since 2008.
If you would like your company to be featured in Member Spotlight please contact Brittany Jimerson, brittany@tsanet.org