SkyHigh Networks (Acquired by McAfee) is a CASB vendor serving roughly 600 customers (Fortune 1000 and enterprises) Tierless support organization Roughly 70 engineers worldwide organized in  pods of technology excellence. Overall McAfee has 800+ Tech Support professionals Support team sits with engineering and cloud ops Customer Success Managers do consultative work (not comped on renewal)  Big shift in Support has come due to  “Cloudification”  Important to focus on overall customer experience rather than on an individual metric like first response time etc.  Robust ..read more

Josh is Sr Director Product Marketing, Global Services, VMware VMware has ~500K customers & partners around the globe. Support is seen as competitive differentiator and growth engine for VMware and that's how they decided to run Support like product team Org structure -- Roughly 2500 folks reporting into Chief Customer Officer (Scott). 3 teams — Support (Global Support Services), Digital Services (Product + Engg + Marketing), Customer Advocacy. Technology Stack --  Salesforce (Ticketing, Knowledge Base), IBM Watson for Machine Learning/AI, Coveo for Search Two internally built produc ..read more

Wrike provides a SaaS platform work management — project management and collaboration Customers are small business to enterprise level. 20K+ across 130 countries. Freemium model 60+ people in support team across Eastern Europe. Two tiered support. Majority in Tier-1. Support Ops and Documentation team part of overall support team as well Several thousand tickets per month across email, web, live chat (paid customers only) and phone Incoming cases — 10-15% product issues. Rest how-to cases Support tool stack: Zendesk, Guru (internal knowledge), Wrike (task management) Friction points in Suppor ..read more

"Single pane of glass for simplistic support is missing" Adam’s team is responsible for support operations  Customers — Traditionally sold products to Service Providers but now sell to a lot of enterprises globally Support Organization— Primary JTAC (Juniper Technical Assistance Center) — outsourced Level-1 support , Advanced TAC (Level-2/3 Support), Advanced Services, Resident Engineers, Named Engineer(s), Customer Care for administrative support, Customer Success (just starting). Teams are primarily global. Roughly 1200 people. Tier-1 /outsourced is roughly ~500. Support Tech stack — M ..read more

Key metric for Services organization (from a SaaS perspective) is Renewal Patty leads Global Services Organization — Support, Professional Services and Success Palo Alto is going through a huge transformation  from a hardware company to more of a SaaS company. Partners going through transformation as well Huge focus on direct education to customers and even educating  partners SaaS changes entire customer journey from pre-sales to post-sales — handoff is even more critical Clear customer journey map is needed to do this handoff properly Self-service and machine learning are big them ..read more

“When a customer files a ticket, there is a fault in your product or training” Netskope customers are across different verticals — government, financial services, healthcare, retail, tech All support is provided directly by the company; no channel support Global support with 3 centers - Bangalore, Santa Clara, London Support team has two main components — Support and Small tools/infrastructure ops team (roughly 60 people). Customer success is a different team.  Case volume — 1500/1600 (includes support pre-sales as well). 90%+ is over email/web. Phone is very less.  Cases are split ..read more

Illuminate offers several products for teachers, administrators, school districts and for parents Primary folks calling in are administrators Illuminate recently had a 5-way merger and had to integrate several ticketing systems — shared inbox, multiple Zendesk instances, Freshworks, Servicecloud. Done by a 3rd party — Import2.com Incoming tickets — several thousand a month. Volume is double during back to schools months (Aug/Sep/Oct) Matt leads the Support Team which  is part of overall Services Team (Support, Success, Implementation, Migrations, Data Team, L&D) Support Team has 3 di ..read more

Energage initially started with product that does “Top Workplace”. Companies purchase Energage to get a better sense of the data and use that to engage effectively with employees. Energage customers are small enterprises (50) to large enterprises (5000+ employees.). Overall 8000 customers; both paying and non-paying. Split is roughly 50/50. Team -  Roughly 7 onboarding and support team, customer education team (just starting), product services (just starting) and customer success (5 and expanding). Technology — Case management (Salesforce), Contact Center (RingCentral), In-app education ..read more

Postman has 8 million registered users across 400K organizations Freemium model but support for all users. Changed internal perspective by not calling them “free” users but users who have not derived enough value to pay for the product. Sales Support in Bangalore Product Support needs responsiveness and is distributed across the globe.  10 Individuals across Hawaii, Austin, Portugal, Nigeria, New Zealand, India). That helps in managing round the clock support. Also, San Francisco and Bangalore are highly competitive markets. Customer success Team 6 people High Responsiveness — First res ..read more

Key Insights When do support leaders reach out to you — when they are in trouble (slightly less than 50%) e.g., customers are dissatisfied, leaving or complaining, support attrition etc., and when they are not in trouble (rest) — move towards strategic thinking, agent soft skills training etc. Customer Success needs to be advisory and not quota-carrying  (almost all SaaS companies have Customer Success function, though most on-prem companies  are still thinking about it) Metrics — More than half companies measure NPS. Focus needs to be on strategic metrics like customer retention (b ..read more