“I Didn’t Even Reach Out for Help”: How BetterCloud Delivers Proactive Support

Our customers are IT professionals. So if they encounter an error in our product, they need fast, effective technical support in order to get back to supporting and securing their organization. This is why we strive to provide world-class support to our customers, and what inspired Proactive Support. We want our customers to know that we value their experience and understand that their time is critical. No other software company does support the way we do, because no one is as dedicated to delighting their customers as much as we are.

The pain of traditional support

Traditional support is usually reactive: You only get help after you reach out with a problem.

The entire experience is a hassle. You run into an error and try to self-solve. Eventually, you accept that you need to contact support, but figuring out how can be a struggle in itself. Then you have to explain your issue, which is time-consuming. Of course, that begins the struggle of waiting for a response, clarifying what’s happening on your end, having the ticket escalated—you know the drill.

When all is said and done, the average customer support ticket resolution time is 3 days 10 hours. Often, it’s just so much easier to say “forget it” and leave your problem for another day. Help can be hard to ask for, even if it means just opening a chat box.

Proactive Support: personally addressing your specific problem before you even ask for help

At BetterCloud, we’re changing the customer support model. We proactively help you before you even reach out to us.

We have a support agent on the team who actively monitors the errors in the application. If you encounter an issue, we can offer help for your specific problem before you even think of submitting a ticket or, better yet, before you even know you have a problem. After being helped by Proactive Support, a customer told us that we gave him “support before I even knew I needed it.”

A significant percentage of our support interactions are proactive, not reactive. Proactive Support takes away the burden of reaching out and describing what you’re experiencing. It makes support as painless as possible, and it’s something many customers have never experienced before.

“I’ve worked in IT for over 25 years and have never had a vendor support agent proactively reach out to check if I was having a problem. After having a series of issues with BetterCloud, I was just going to write it off as a bad day and get on with something else. Your Proactive Support agent contacted me to ask what was happening, and he resolved the issues as quickly as he could. I am very impressed,” said one customer.

Proactive Support instantly saves you hours of work

IT teams are typically lean and very busy, tasked with accomplishing a lot in a limited amount of time. So when IT admins run into an error message, they don’t always think to contact us. They move onto another task.

“When we reach out to customers right away and immediately start troubleshooting, we save them the time that they don’t have,” says BetterCloud’s Director of Technical Support Chris Fadell.

One customer told us, “Very good service. I didn’t expect for tech support to just jump on a chat. They probably saved me an hour of work.”

Another customer said, “Amazing! Ethan reached out very quickly after I started having issues and was able to pinpoint the issue. Great service!”

Our support team is extraordinarily fast. They can see what’s happening in real time and reach out seconds to minutes after an error occurs. In fact, our average resolution time for proactive chat is 20 minutes.

Fulfilling our customer promise, and always striving to delight

You may be wondering why we go out of our way to open more tickets, which is the complete opposite of what most companies want to do. It all comes back to our customer promise: We empower our customers by sharing expertise in SaaS management and security, driving success with delight, and ensuring a trusted experience.

One impressed customer told us, “I didn’t even reach out for help. Ethan noticed that something wasn’t right on the site and reached out to me. His customer service always stands out as being top notch.”

Our CEO David Politis explains how Proactive Support sets us apart:

“[Proactive Support] has been a competitive advantage because most people are running [support] the old way. For [traditional support teams], things like adding chat and opening more tickets are viewed as very, very bad. They refrain from doing it, thinking they need 20 more people to do it, but for us, it’s become part of our DNA.”

That’s because our entire company is committed to delighting the people who depend on our product to help them do their jobs successfully. In fact, we have three guiding principles at BetterCloud: Enjoy the journey and learn from it, work hard with a sense of purpose, and always strive to delight.

“It’s the last principle that has transformed our support into what it is, encouraged the team to be innovative, and set the support bar high,” says Fadell.

“Being able to delight the customers as much as we can when they have a bad experience, like running into an error or a bug, is always our goal. We’re there to help them get that sorted out and back on track. So as much as we can help, we want to,” adds Fadell.

Delighting our customers is integral to BetterCloud’s mission, which is why we love hearing things like, “THIS is how you do customer support!!!” and “I’ve never had such great proactive support in the past. I’m beyond words :)”

Us vs. the other guy

Our Proactive Support is entirely unlike what other companies call proactive support.

At some companies, proactive support means posting about a bug update or product issue on a status page. While this is helpful, it’s very broad and still puts the burden on the customer to visit the status page to see what’s going on.

“Our Proactive Support is very different. We narrow it down to a specific customer and a specific problem, and then reach out to them about their specific incident. It’s a personalized experience that offers a resolution right then and there,” explains Fadell.

Additionally, our Proactive Support applies to global issues as well. While doing Proactive Support one day, our agent noticed that there were a number of errors coming from Google Drive transfer failures. Google had unexpectedly changed an API that was causing this action to fail in BetterCloud.

While our engineers worked to fix the roadblock, our Proactive Support agent reached out to customers to let them know what was happening. No one came to us first with that problem; we were able to proactively let customers know why their transfer had failed and that they could expect a solution from us shortly.

So while other companies may say they’re doing proactive support, no one is really doing it quite like us (yet).

BetterCloud may be the only company that does thorough Proactive Support right now, but we believe that this is what the future of technical support looks like. After all, it’s what all of our customers deserve.