Customer Service in the Era of Hybrid Cloud

Jason DePardo discusses the approach that earned Nasuni and its hybrid cloud platform its 4th consecutive customer service award.

July 30, 2024  |  Jason DePardo

“Take care of your customers.” Here at Nasuni our CEO, Paul Flanagan, reminds us of this essential principle nearly every day. These are words we take very seriously as a company, so I’m happy to report that Nasuni was recently recognized again for its outstanding customer service. I’ll get to the awards at the end of this piece. First, I’d like to discuss why great customer service is essential to hybrid cloud success, and what makes our approach different.

1. We focus on the entire customer journey

Hybrid cloud storage is a massive and intensely competitive market. One of the drivers of Nasuni’s continued momentum is our outstanding retention rate. The customer journey starts on day one, during the initial onboarding, but we ensure it continues through to your steady state, whether that’s a few weeks or even a decade after implementation.

Our Customer Success, Customer Service, and Professional Services teams provide a responsive, high-touch experience, and companies consistently cite this as one of their favorite things about Nasuni. “There is best-in-class customer support in the partnership that Nasuni has to offer,” according to Matt Jeske, Director of IT at ESi. “I’ve been in the industry 25 years, I very much value a partnership that is not about just closing the deal. It’s about ensuring that customer success is going to exist.”

2. We truly listen to our customers

One of things I’m most proud of is how we have institutionalized the process of listening to customers. Several years ago, we launched a ‘Voice of the Customer’ program to ensure that we’re not just gathering feedback but responding to that input. As Nasuni President David Grant noted, this has become a core part of our culture.

Take our Net Promoter Score (NPS). I’m thrilled we earned an 87, especially since Bain & Company – the co-creators of the NPS benchmark – regards anything above an 80 as exceptional. This marks several years in a row of world-class NPS scores reflecting our commitment to our customers. Yet I’m also proud of how we treat the process itself. We don’t simply hunt for a marketable score. Our team gathers as much data as possible, allowing us to really analyze the results. Then we act. A customer who is dissatisfied with some element of their Nasuni engagement receives an executive-level follow up to find out how we can turn things around. This is work, but it’s effective. The latest NPS results show how committed we are to satisfying our customer’s business needs, ensuring their success, and generally keeping them happy.

The value of this program and general approach is evident to customers. “Nasuni has a good engagement model with customers, user communities and events to share experiences and gather feedback,” said Paul Petty, Digital Strategy Leader at Laing O’Rourke. “This is seen with strong roadmaps that actually deliver on features we want to see.”

3. Customer feedback shapes our product innovation

Nasuni IQ is a perfect example of what Petty describes. For years our customers have been clamoring for more detailed analytics and insights into their unstructured data. The advent of GenAI only intensified this demand. So, our product team got to work and developed Nasuni IQ, a new feature of the File Data Platform that provides unprecedented data visibility, improves data management, monitors activity, and facilitates data curation for AI use cases. To say Nasuni IQ has been popular among our customers would be an understatement. Our product team built the right tool for the right moment, and we have our customers to thank for influencing our roadmap.

In a larger sense, the Nasuni IQ story illustrates a strategic advantage of our Voice of the Customer program. Great customer service is essential in the hybrid cloud market because it is such a competitive space. Retention is critical. But here at Nasuni we have turned customer service into an innovation feedback loop that further widens the capabilities gap between our product and those of our competitors.

Now on to those awards

The other benefit of taking care of your customers? They vouch for you. The Customer Relationship Management Institute (CRMI) has recognized our best-in-class customer service with our 4th straight NorthFace ScoreBoard Service Award. In addition to our NPS of 87, which was audited by CRMI and based on 1,300+ responses, we earned a 4.8 out of 5 for overall technical support and a 9.5/10 for customer satisfaction. To add to that, the customer-driven software review service G2 gave us 8 awards in their 2024 Summer Reports. G2 recognized us as a leader in Hybrid Cloud Storage Solutions and Disaster Recovery, and I was happy to see that more than three-quarters of Nasuni customers gave us a 5-star overall rating.

Together, these awards are a great validation of our approach to customer service, but I can tell you that we are going to be digging deep to figure out how to edge that 4.8 closer to 5 and push that 9.5 up to 10. Customer service and success are more important than ever in the age of hybrid cloud, and we will continue to take care of – and listen to – our customers for years to come.

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