I once managed enterprise software while running large travel call centres. All 250 agents use this huge SaaS tool in the centre to manage bookings and customer information – critical to our operational performance and efficiency.
Although we were expecting 99 percent uptime, we ALWAYS had outages. It was a poor tool, which I was ultimately stuck with after an executive had decided to purchase it for MILLIONS a couple of years earlier. (Key lesson here, let the people who use the tools choose the tools!).
I had to contact the vendor’s customer support team whenever this system went down. Now, bear in mind that we paid for premium – best of the best – customer support.
An unresponsive vendor
They didn’t even provide a phone number…
I used to raise tickets that went seemingly into the ether; However, they’d committed to a 15-minute response time (pretty standard for live operations), but it was never met and caused severe operational issues.
As an aside, there’s also the human impact. If you’re running a system and it goes down, everyone is coming to you for a resolution – if you depend on an unresponsive vendor, there’s no way of reassuring people or getting them off your back.
This ultimately led to hundreds of missed calls, sales opportunities and lousy customer experience ratings – different from what you need in a highly competitive industry.
Sure, we held them accountable with service credits, but at that point, the damage was already done – and we ended up playing catchup for days.
The support you need
When I moved into tech, I resolved never to deliver that B2B customer support experience, and thankfully, I ended up at Tyk. Even before my time, Tyk had a stellar reputation for customer service amongst its user base – something I’ve tried very hard to retain and scale over the last three years.
Gartner reviews from Tyk clients show the quality of our service and support
So we hired our first support engineers into the business, built a little team and got the relevant tooling and infrastructure to support our users.
We don’t hire call centre agents to deal with enterprise technology queries, checking boxes before routing you to a department that can handle your issue. All of our support engineers are technical folks with a wide range of experience in API management, infrastructure technology and developer tools.
We’re also a globally distributed, remote team. Our support engineers are spread across the globe and ensure complete coverage 24/7/365 for our customers in all regions.
Customers have access to our support team based on their package. EVERY customer of Tyk has access to our dedicated support desk, where they can raise issues and concerns for resolution.
Customers who opt for an enhanced SLA package benefit from a phone number to call in case of emergencies, screen shares, regular meetings with customer solutions architects and tight response times. Check out another blog here around our Gold SLA offering.
We also have robust internal escalation procedures, so on the rare occasion we need to draft in specific expertise and domain knowledge, it’ll happen quickly and efficiently.
Our safety net will back you up
Our support engineering team delivers and cares about maintaining operational performance. You don’t have to believe me; our customers keep telling us themselves:
We’re so proud of our support that we’re willing to share and celebrate our key metrics:
- In the last three months, we’ve hit 99 percent SLA compliance on support ticket response times
- In the same period, we achieved a 98 percent Customer Satisfaction score
- Our first response time average for Gold SLA clients is 38 minutes
So, if you’re looking for an API Management vendor and don’t want to be this guy:
Come to Tyk and sleep easy, knowing your critical infrastructure has a highly competent, performant safety net backing you up.
Got any questions? Let one of our expert engineers help you. Email us directly at [email protected] with your questions or request a call back at a time convenient for you.
