Customer service and cloud computing
What is the core value proposition of cloud computing today? What is it that your public cloud provider is providing? What does your private cloud environment allow you to provide your own IT customers? Why are end users in the know so excited about the new capabilities they gain from using various cloud offerings?
I'll give you a hint. The three acronyms by which cloud fare is usually categorized all end in three letters: "aaS," short for "as a Service".
Service is the name of the game in cloud computing. It is at the heart of why end users can worry less knowing that their providers are doing most of the worrying for them. Treating customers right is a differentiator; in fact, it is probably the most critical differentiator in the relatively crowded Infrastructure as a Service market.
Yet, I have long observed that customer service is an afterthought in the design of cloud-related hardware, management software and even many online services. So much emphasis is put on functionality and "self-service"--in the mechanics of provisioning and elasticity--that often some basic support for customer care is left wanting.
I'm not so much talking about the "premium support" services offered by the likes of Amazon and most of the so-called "cloudcenters." There is a reason that they cost money; if someone is going to spend time on your case, they have to be compensated, which means the vendor has the right to charge you for the service. This is not a diatribe against for-fee support services.
However, I know of no cloud platform vendors that have built customer service into their platforms. In my mind's eye, it should be simple for the average Joe to:
- collect data when a problem occurs
- report the problem with a click of a button
- have a "self-service" case created with fields where customers can track the progress they are making against issue resolution--and which can be "mined" by the vendor's support organization to discover trending bugs, etc.
- search documentation for workarounds or solutions without having to jump through hoops
- have the option to jump to a chat session or forum where he or she might get some help
- have the option to select a one-time premium support option if a case warrants it
Now, I've been in the enterprise software business long enough to know that making support profitable--or even sustainable--is more complicated than it sounds. But how hard would it be to give customers a clear sign that their issues are of concern to the vendor, whether or not they are a premium support customer?
I think the first cloud infrastructure vendor that puts a big effort into treating the end-user right through software will have a tremendous advantage in both enterprise and service provider settings. Integration with Remedy for that "self-service" case creation and tracking, for instance.
What do you think? Is there a need for customer service to be built into your cloud-computing platform? What features would you like to see?
James Urquhart is a seasoned field technologist with almost 20 years of experience in distributed systems development and deployment, focusing on service-oriented architectures, cloud computing, and virtualization. James is currently market manager for the Data Center 3.0 strategy at Cisco Systems, though the opinions expressed here are strictly his own. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. 
Every hardware vendor who wants to be a major player in the cloud (everyone) needs to understand who their customer is going to be in the next few years because it is changing rapidly due to the Cloud.
In this case I can see segmentation in verticals as well as maturity and size requiring unique services.
The company that seamlessly gives the cloud provider and the end user company what they want will win the lion share. VMWare knows this, hence we have Vsphere.
The good news is the hardware vendor has the experience in providing services with paper thin margins. Now they need to step up the game and now more than ever provide amazing services that speak to the segment. And one size will not fit all as end users become providers and providers become customers.
Either way, fun time for those of us who love technology revolution and the challenge to solve services opportunities.
As a cloud services provider we utterly dependent on renewals to ensure our future growth. As every cloud vendor knows there are two methods of ensuring retention - locking the customer in by making it hard for them to leave the service, or by constant innovation and good customer care.
Unfortunately the prior is always cheaper than the latter, but cloud providers need to remember that we are only ever the custodians of the customer data - never the owner. At Mimecast we've managed to attain one of the highest customer retention rates in the industry - at over 99% - but any user of our service can export his data in a number of different formats in a couple of mouse clicks. We'll even deliver it back to them on an encrypted external harddisk if they want to save bandwidth. Our customers stay with us because every single employee in the business recognises that the customer is king and the provision of security and availability for their data is sacrosanct.
To achieve this level of customer service, we decided not to use a Platform-as-a-Service provider such as Amazon. Relying on a third-party infrastructure provider would have limited our ability to innovate (we use a parallel grid architecture with a shared immutable distributed filing system with extremely strong chains-of-custody, not something you'd get from your average PaaS/IaaS provider); and it would have also meant our Service Level Agreements would have been limited to that of a third-party (for instance we offer 5 nines availability - 99.999%, utilising Amazon would have reduced this to 99.9% - this is the difference between less than five minutes downtime a year and nearly 9 hours a year).
Too many people read the menu right-to-left when considering cloud offerings, but the incremental costs between a good enterprise-focused solution and a more consumer-orientated one is often very small. Consider that in the past, the costs of implementing high-availability clustering on premise to achieve 99.999% availability against accepting 99.9% availability has been exponentially higher. In contrast the cost differential between a cloud provider offering 99.999% vs. one offering 99.9% is typically fractional.
Cloud computing is a democratising technology - it enables the smallest of organisations to harness computing power and best practices that were beyond their means a matter of years ago. It allows organisations to move from being technology-focused, to being business-focused, through outsourcing the management of the plumbing to experts.
Customers of cloud computing vendors must demand more from their providers and they must exercise caveat emptor - not all clouds are created equal.
Dr James Blake
Global Chief Security Officer
Mimecast
Cloud computing is much like the mainframe environments of my past, with more sophisticated "terminals" and connections. Support was very carefully built in, at all levels, for hardware and software.
By contrast, some of my clients now treat GoOgle Apps as their "cloud"... with file storage, coordinated calendaring/scheduling, document collaboration, contact management, and on, and on. Yet, no support mechanism is built in to GoOgle Apps by the provider (GoOgle), beyond that which may be given by the administrator who sets up this environment (the webmaster).
As Dr. Blake says, and as I've learned, "not all clouds are created equal" and "customers must exercise caveat emptor." We cannot always "demand more from ... providers", though (if I might call GoOgle a provider), as there is not always a response.
http://developer.nirvanix.com/blogs/nirvanix/archive/2009/04/24/cnet-covers-customer-service-needs-in-the-cloud-we-agree.aspx
Thanks for saying what needed to be said!
Great Article on Customer Service and Cloud Computing!
I was wondering if I can have reprint rights for my blog, The Hot Air Channel - http://www.hotair.net
Thanks,
Phil
A quick point of clarification regarding "Premium Support". GoGrid doesn't charge for our 24x7 support and we offer email, voice & chat support. You are correct about AWS having the paid support option. Also, I believe that even the RackSpace/Mosso Fanatical Support will soon come with a charge as well (although I couldn't figure it out from their site exactly: http://www.mosso.com/cloudservers_pricing.jsp Read the bottom of that page and give me your interpretation).
Anyway, I wholeheartedly agree with you that having stellar customer support with any new type of technology or paradigm shift is critical to its success. Thanks for the article!
-Michael Sheehan
Tech Evangelist for GoGrid
- by sharmajunior May 16, 2009 10:16 AM PDT
- I love the cloud conecpt and all. The one thing I want not to happen is the Microsoft philosophy to the cloud. By that i mean Give the best rates to cusotmers, lure them in and then once they are locked, then do waht ever you like with them because it would be harder for them to switch over.
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(8 Comments)If ia m incorrect on any of this, please correct me. Its a new conecpt to many that is gaining ground.