We invited Kimberly Gress — Director, Client Services — as a guest blogger for "Moving to a Service Cloud", to speak about how Dell Boomi uses the cloud for better customer service.
At Dell Boomi, we’ve always viewed our ability to provide exceptional customer support as a top priority. Even though our cloud-based integration platform dramatically simplifies the data integration process, every customer’s situation is unique. There will always be a need to answer product questions, offer assistance with best practices, or provide general training and technical support.
In the summer of 2010, as a company experiencing rapid growth, we had a traditional support model in place that was heavily dependent on people and manual processes. Under this model, supporting our growing customer base meant scaling service resources linearly with the number of our customers—potentially risking lowering our service levels if we couldn’t hire fast enough.
We realized the time had come to upgrade to a more efficient service and support system—one that reflected our core values as a company. Why not deliver service and support as, well…a service? We believe in the value of cloud computing to increase capacity or add capabilities on demand, so it only makes sense that we leverage this ability to better respond to support requests.
Enter the Dell Boomi Service and Support Customer Portal, which we introduced in June. Based on Salesforce.com Service Cloud, the new Customer Portal features several enhancements specifically requested by our customers to better support their development on the AtomSphere platform. Among the new features, the new Customer Portal offers:
- Seamless integration via a single sign-on from your AtomSphere account
- A searchable knowledge base to help you find resolutions quickly and easily
- A 360-degree view of your support cases, with the simplified ability to track the current status and actions taken on your requests
- Access to Boomi's user community for idea and solution exchange
The idea behind these enhancements is two-pronged. On one, we aimed to deliver an array of services and support options through the Customer Portal so that we could dramatically streamline support requests and track responses. On the other, we wanted to tap into the value of collaboration and the wisdom of the crowd so that our customers could capture the best answers and most innovative ideas from the experienced Boomi user community.
Already, we’ve seen the benefits of the new Customer Portal. For example, in Sept 2010, 80 percent of Dell Boomi service requests came through chat. Early results have shown about 23 percent of customer requests are now addressed via the portal for self-service support, while requests originating through chat has decreased to 43 percent. Likewise, we’ve seen a significant improvement in problem resolution. Our original goal was to reduce the average time to close service requests by 15% by end of December 2011. We’ve actually surpassed that goal and, as of July, the average time to close service requests had fallen 18%.
Taken together, these new features are a big leap forward in ensuring the success of our clients’ integration processes. If you’re a customer and you haven’t already seen the changes to our support services, take a peek at a brief demo or visit our frequently asked questions for more information.
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