Datacenter Care
The things I love about Datacenter Care is the a la carte nature of the offering. The contract is really flexible and the services delivered correspond exactly to what we bought. The contract brings solid help to the decision-making process, especially in view of returning to a financial balance. Thanks to better planning and predictability the level of IT risk has been considerably reduced. Hewlett Packard Enterprise offers a unique support service branded as HPE Datacenter Care. The service offers a flexible, cost effective, tailored, relationship-based approach to support the most challenging IT environments, simplifying and enriching the IT experience. With Datacenter Care, customers can tailor the service to include the building blocks they need and not pay for what they don't need. Datacenter Care customers include enterprises with many different types of workloads, from cloud to hyperscale to SAP, across all industries. ORC International has been conducting the Customer Relationship Assessment program for Hewlett Packard Enterprise and their Datacenter Care customers since 2013. In that time, satisfaction and NPS results evidence an extremely high degree of excellence in service delivery. 83.3% HPE NPS Net Promoter Score* = 81.1 14.4% 2.2% HPE's Datacenter Care support service attracts an NPS score of 81.1 which is outstanding. To put this into perspective, Satmetrix 2016 results for NPS by industry shows a range of results from a low of 2 to a high of 58. Even the very top performing companies usually attract an NPS score well under 80 (for example in 2013 Apple iphone attracted an NPS score of 70, while Amazon's NPS score was 69) **. To understand the underlying reasons for such high customer satisfaction, ORC International conducted in-depth interviews with Datacenter Care customers to uncover what was really special about the service. Flexible and Scalable Customers indicate high satisfaction with the flexibility and scalability of the Datacenter Care support offering. While the contract is quite standard, it has a lot of flexibility built in. We are able to add support on some servers, month to month or quarter to quarter, or be able to change the type of support as quickly and easily. That HPE are able to adapt and work with us, this is really very good. Account Management as a Partnership HPE dedicated Account Managers work in a partnership model with customers. With an intimate knowledge of the customer s IT environment, nature of their business, and their desired short and long term outcomes, HPE deliver an outstanding service. With Datacenter Care, we work as a partnership. The HPE account management team know our level of knowledge and how our environment is set up and because we've worked closely with them for a number of years, if we say something is broken, they know it's broken and then they get right onto it and solve it. We find when we contact other vendors everything is very scripted through a service desk, and they want to ask all the same questions because they don't think we have the technical skills to fault-find. * Results from 1Q16 Customer Relationship Assessment Program NPS = Promoters (Score 9-10) minus Detractors (Score 0-6) ** See https://www.netpromoter.com/nps-benchmarks and http://www.insightsfromanalytics.com/blog/bid/324678/top-10-u-s-net-promoter-scores-nps-for-2013
HPE SATISFACTION RESULTS 76.6% Overall Satisfaction = 76.6% 23.4% 0.0% Loyalty Index (LI) 95.2 % Repurchase 87.2 % Highest Areas of Satisfaction 1 2 3 Hardware Specialists 88.6% Account Support Team 88.2% Technical Account Manager (TAM) 84.8% The Relationship The proficiency and expertise of the HPE personnel, in particular the Account Managers are key to the Datacenter Care experience. The detailed knowledge of the customer and the business means that recommendations are relevant and practical, with the long term health of the IT environment as the central focus of the ongoing support. They listen very carefully to the needs of the customer and make sure that the services being offered are tailored to our needs. Our account manager called during the weekend to make sure we doing ok and if we needed any support or anything escalated. They were very proactive. Knowing the IT Environment The closeness of the working relationship gives the HPE account management team an intimate understanding of the customer s business and IT environment and this plays a crucial role in reducing incidents and resolving them quickly when they do occur. I would rate the leader of the account team 10 out of 10. He knows our site very well and he is always there to help in any situation. He is helping to lead our future planning. Account management has been excellent. Having HPE Datacenter Care means that we have a third party that can pick up the running environment, resolve issues and understand what we do as a business, that's quite critical. It's a huge benefit and it's current, it's maintained. They know our business site. It's one of the single biggest reasons I deal with HPE. They are excellent people. I really value their time and their knowledge. It's very compelling. They know our business and IT environment and have a very good understanding of our data centers. They know our internal teams, our servers and software and that alignment means that when there is an incident, that familiarity plays a huge rule in how quickly incidents are resolved.
Trust The HPE support team become part of the customer's IT team. This provides a level of trust that transcends the ordinary customer-supplier model. When customers do have an issue, they know they don't have explain everything to the support team - they already know their system so well. Sometimes we find that a server was not registered in the contract, and we would open what we call a 'trust' call and HPE would act on the server, providing support, and then the administration will be dealt with at a later time. It's very much appreciated. If I had one main reason to recommend HPE Datacenter Service to someone who had a need for this type of support, my reason would be trust and confidence. To ensure that we have an IT environment where there are no surprises. We work well together, they visit us quite frequently, they reach out at least once a quarter, their management will reach out or come onto site just to make sure things are running well. I can call them any time. It's a bit like insurance. While everything is going well, you don't think about it, but when things turn ugly, you rely on it. An Insurance Policy Customers spoke of Datacenter Care as an insurance policy, to ensure that when and if incidents do occur, that they are covered to ensure that the issue is resolved as quickly as possible. Having the HPE team sourced locally, regular on-site visits, knowing the environment and the customer's team, leads to speedy and effective solutions. We were about to move our primary data center and given the risk and the costs associated with moving, we wanted to have a support contract that would cover us and mitigate the risks. We knew that Datacenter Care would give us better response time during the move, compared to standard support and that was going to be highly critical for us. It was very useful during that time. We got very quick responses.
Active Monitoring Means Fewer Incidents Proactive monitoring, together with regular reporting provides the customer with a stable environment with few incidents. The rarity of incidents along with the transparency of reporting gives customers a strong sense of confidence that their environment is secure. Many customers extend HPE Datacenter Care further, with remote monitoring and management using HPE Datacenter Care Operational Support Services. In fact, we have a very small list of problems which is excellent and this is because of the day to day work they do. There is a highly proactive component to this which is largely unseen, but is really imperative. Without it, things will go off the cliff much more quickly and far more often. The small number of support calls we have to log each month give me the confidence that HPE are doing what needs to be done and doing it well. From a risk mitigation perspective I would say that's where the value in the support contract. We rarely have incidents, maybe 1 or 2 in the last year and this is due to the proactive support from HPE. They will put together month to month report on hardware that is potentially trending, disk failures, any kind of consistent replacements that we re doing. They are very proactive, sometimes they reach out to us first, it may not be a critical thing yet, but they will let us know before anything becomes critical. They react very quickly when things go wrong. They line up the right people and we include them in any kind of trouble shooting that may relate to their particular hardware. Before Things Become Critical Depth of understanding of customer's IT environment and proactive monitoring means that the HPE account support engineers are often in front of any potential issues, ensuring diagnosis and resolution before an incident occurs. HPE provide proactive support, so if for instance something goes wrong with firmware we are notified up front. There is also automated support, so if a system fails an alert goes to HPE, sometimes they call us before we even know there is a problem.
When we log a severity one incident we need to get it resolved within four hours. Datacenter Care support ensures that we get an assigned manager and the best engineers who try to resolve it, which is really beneficial to us. Escalation Management The close relationship with the HPE Account Support Manager means that when rare incidents do occur, the customer has a single point of contact to escalate to. They can feel confident that the HPE Manager knows their system, knows what to do, can corral the necessary resources and take ownership of the issue until resolution is achieved. When there is a need for escalation they are extremely responsive, and that's imperative. I can't afford to be in a position where finger pointing is going on and no one is taking ownership. HPE will step in immediately, and they've proven that in the past, it's something I really like in my relationship with them. They are highly accountable to solving the problem. We ve got a good relationship with the local tech guys. While we utilise the structured engagement website for logging jobs, we give our local team a heads up through an email or phone call and they start looking after it before it s escalated internationally. The account service manager who is onsite here, I can do any kind of escalation through him, if I can t get the support I need say on a weekend, he would find the necessary people for us to get our system up and running. That single point of contact is really a valuable asset. Global Support Because HPE has a global network of expertise, support is provided on a 24/7 hour basis. Local HPE teams work with their international colleagues to ensure speedy and effective results. Leveraging the knowledge and the availability of after hours support that we get from Datacenter Care was really an attractive part of the offering for us. Our business operates on a 24/7 basis, so having our systems available 24/7 was imperative. So we needed a support contract with a vendor we can trust, and we know that HPE can deliver the support we want, the decision was made to go with HPE.
Working with Other Vendors HPE provides multi-vendor support which not only streamlines the provision of IT support into a customer s environment, but proves to be a cost saving overall. Even for those customers who do not specifically have multi-vendor support, HPE works proactively with other vendors to ensure that a solution is reached. Ultimately there is a cost driving consideration to a lot of that decision making, but importantly, HPE had established themselves as a solid provider of support for their infrastructure equipment (servers etc), so we were looking to leverage that for other non-hpe items. When they came to us to let us know that they could offer support for non-hpe software we were very interested because a) we could get the synergy of the support, we're only calling one support provider instead of two and b) because we thought it should provide a cost saving, which in fact it did turn out to do. They do a very good job of looking after the non-hpe software that is on our equipment. They will work with other suppliers for a group solution, if required. Root cause analysis, try and figure out why something has gone wrong, and get a solution as quickly as possible. Conclusion HPE s Datacenter Care service attracts exceptional satisfaction results due to the strength of the relationship between customer s IT staff and the HPE Account Support Managers. HPE s in-depth knowledge of customer s business and IT environment means proactive monitoring, few incidents and timely and informed guidance as well as innovative new solutions.