OVHcloud has always kept customer relationships at the heart of its strategy. Three years ago, by setting up the freephone (1007 number in France for instance), OVHcloud set itself apart from other providers by including high-quality support with its services. To address the structural challenges associated with this commitment in a period of rapid growth, and offer its customers access to support via a richer digital experience, OVHcloud is working on a new support offering. The aim of this is to maintain the same level of high-quality support, and respond to a varying set of customer needs.
What is this strategy based on?
Our challenge is to mobilise our team of support agents in a way that brings the most value to our customers, and this involves being as reactive and proactive as possible where our customers need it most.
The priority is to respond to our customers’ need for autonomy, by giving them the support they need to manage their solutions efficiently 24/7 using digital tools.
Our duty is to maintain clear promises to our customers when incidents occur, and support them with their business challenges.
How have we started to transform?
A set of digital tools for our customers
Chatbot
We have provided our customers with an online chatbot that can answer the most frequently asked questions, and proactively provide information in the event of a major incident.
Help Centre
Since early 2019, OVHcloud has provided customers with a set of tools and solutions, especially in a new space, initially for our French customers, called the Help Centre. The Help Centre has been highly successful, with more than 70,000 visits per month and a usage growth of more than 20%, month after month. This Help Center will be still improved and deployed at international at the end January 2020
In this space, customers can easily find answers to the most frequently asked questions (e.g. “How can I track my order?” “How do I view my bill?” etc.), and a wide range of guides to help them configure and use OVHcloud solutions. Our guides are constantly being updated by our advisors and technical reviewers in line with the extensive customer feedback they receive. Every month, our guides are viewed around 300,000 times.
Customers can also use the Help Centre to view the status of their services in real-time (Status tasks, Real-time statuses).
And being OVHcloud customers makes them a part of a community, so we offer them the ability to contribute to the help centre. There are two tools for this:
- Community.ovh.com: a community platform where customers can help one another, ask questions and get answers (from fellow OVHcloud customers and employees).
- With a tool for measuring customer satisfaction with the content of our guides, we can continuously improve their quality. We measure a satisfaction rate of 80% from our guide users.
Livechat
Sometimes, customers may not find answers to their questions. In this case, they can contact one of our agents directly on Livechat. The agent can then provide them with support, and identify an opportunity to improve our digital experience. The Livechat has been deployed progressively since summer 2018, starting with the Web and Telecom teams, and more recently, the Cloud team.
A more user-friendly OVHcloud Control Panel
We are also improving experience for customers when they escalate incidents or requests via the OVHcloud Control Panel. Depending on the responses provided to certain questions, customers will now be redirected to the most relevant digital content (guides, FAQs, tutorials, etc.), but they can still open a ticket if they cannot find what they are looking for online (with the ability to be more precise with information, which can help avoid lengthy back and forth with our support team, aiming to provide better customer satisfaction and quicker resolution to problems).
Overall, we are radically transforming the way we interact with customers. Interaction through tickets via the OVHcloud Control Panel represents 50% of the support requests we receive.
How will we continue adapting to our customers’ needs?
All of our customers require varying levels of reactivity and support. Some of them use our solutions for personal projects and are quite limited in how they use them. However, others base their company websites on our solutions, making them critical for their business.
We understand that it is difficult for our customers to choose which solution is best suited to their requirements, and work out which of them offer the best value. To help with this, in the next few weeks we will be launching a four-level support structure.
Web and Telecom customers – Market
To manage this, in the next few months we will launch a two-level solution for our Market customers. The first level is essentially digital support, with the ability to contact us in the event of a service interruption, and a second level that provides access to priority processing as well as custom support in using and configuring a solution.
Moreover, many customers contact us for support that falls outside of the scope of OVHcloud (e.g. creating a website with WordPress, configuring mailboxes on a fleet of smartphones). We would like to easily provide simple, helpful responses to these requests in future with our constantly growing network of partners.
Cloud customers
For customers using cloud projects, which present a wide variation of business challenges and resource usage, we offer all four levels of support.
The first level offers our customers round-the-clock autonomy via a digital experience, and they can rest assured that any hardware issues will be proactively fixed. Customers can also contact us and submit intervention requests for the datacentre team to replace hardware components 24/7, with maximum wait periods of 24-72 hours depending on the component types and subscription.
Our support advisors are also available during working hours to help with diagnostics, if required.
The second level of support responds to a higher level of criticality, and offers higher levels of engagement from OVHcloud in terms of reactivity.
Both response times and hardware component replacement times will be shorter, to adapt to the challenges faced by our priority customers. On top of the commitments previously mentioned, support agents are still available during working hours not only for incidents, but also to assist our customers in configuring and using our solutions.
Enterprise customers
For customers with greater business challenges and a need for growth, scalability and 24/7 reactivity for production environments. Also provides customers visibility on their resource usage. We offer two other levels for this.
These two levels were created two years ago, and we set up a team that operates 24/7, with a high level of expertise dedicated to this customer group.
OVHcloud’s teams are rich in experience from working with more than 100 Enterprise customers since the solution was launched. This experience is what helps us offer custom services and continue developing this solution to respond to digitally transforming key accounts.
The commitment from OVHcloud teams on these levels must ensure consistency between the service level provided, and customers’ business challenges.
The Business level is the first Professional Services level. It connects our customers’ technical teams to OVHcloud teams who are experienced in meeting very short deadlines 24/7, and quickly grouping together the right experts to resolve major subjects for production and business continuity. Knowing our customers is what helps us adapt to specific situations. Our commitment to providing explanations on incidents that occur should also help our customers improve security for their environments.
The Enterprise level is the highest-level contract, with the biggest commitments.
With the technical support and Technical Account Manager teams working round-the-clock in both French and English, combined with support from the Sales teams deployed globally, OVHcloud supports its customers every day in securing and accelerating their business.
This service level engages the entire OVHcloud maintenance chain in making our customers’ projects a success, via adapted services such as support from our Solutions Architect. Tracking from the Technical Account Manager team provides customers with the level of visibility they need on their usage and performance when managing ambitious projects.
Here is an example of a custom plan: for one of our Enterprise customers operating in the events sector, we secure their annual event, which generates exceptional traffic spikes. Its national visibility is significant to the point that it is absolutely vital not to experience any downtime. To ensure this, our teams are in regular contact with the customer, and prepare several months in advance by organising test campaigns and aligning with one another on the hardware and human resources to mobilise.
This is the transformation we have started to put into action, and we will continue developing it over the next few months.
We will publish more communications on this topic in the future.
Our objective is to always remain attentive to our customers’ needs, and provide them with the very best responses.
