How Aryaka’s customer support team achieves over 95% customer retention rates

“Customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They do expect you to fix things when they go wrong.”
– Donald Porter, VP of British Airways

Last week, we talked about how the sidekicks (customer support team) have well and truly arrived. Today, I want to ask you how often have you recommended a product/service because of the brilliant experience you had with a particular person on the other side of the help line or help desk? Let me guess… more than once?

Customer support has become the most cost-effective solution to retain and grow your customer base. Bad customer experiences, in contrast, lead to a dip in customer loyalty, brand image, and eventually a business’s bottom line, as poor customer service is the most common reason companies give for switching to new services/products.

As customers start to engage with companies across multiple channels, they expect consistent and reliable experiences. This is particularly true for enterprise IT customers, since investments in IT and networking technologies can be substantial. In fact, the true value of a product/service is constrained by the time it takes to fix it when something goes wrong. Customer expectations can be met not only through architecting and deploying technology that performs the best, but also through building a support team that is empathetic, responsive and super talented. At Aryaka, we have acknowledged this reality from the day we were born and have made it into our top priority.

Aryaka is built on a high support model. We are more of a trusted partner than a standalone vendor.  It is a well-known fact that we win customer contracts because of the unmatched performance and reliability, and our customers stay with us because of extraordinary support experiences. Our customer retention rates are well over 95% and easily among the best in the WAN Optimization and CDN industries.

So, how did we create a team that makes our customers so happy?

1. Building the right culture: Across the entire organization, we believe that our customers are our highest priority, at all times. Customer support is not just the job of the technical support team – it is the responsibility of the entire company. We took steps and established processes so as to instill this culture within each and every employee at Aryaka.
2. Hiring the right people: We hired people who are passionate about helping customers, who will understand how and why we did all the things we did and will keep asking questions till they get it right. People with the right attitude are the foundation of outstanding customer support.
3. Work structure: We give adequate time to the employees to understand the product line well, and we pay them above the industry standard. If we’re going to attract the best talent, we feel responsible to treat them just like we want them to treat customers – as the number-one priority! We invest in training our team regularly on product updates as well as soft skills so that they are never hesitant in helping customers out.
4. Collaboration: We built a centralized Knowledge Management portal that the support team has access to read and write to, so that all the members of the team have a readymade reference point for commonly arising issues.
5. Recognition: We have reward and recognition systems in place to encourage competitiveness and build a motivated customer support team who will have a “can do” attitude at all times. We regularly celebrate individual and team success via gifts/team outings.
6. Belief: Last but not the least, we always believe in our employees and empower them to do a great job. Our support team is a firm believer in the fact that there’s nothing that they can’t do for a customer.

We started small. Followed the principle of ‘one at a time’– one change, one right hire, one good policy – and empowered our support team with trust and responsibility so that there is a complete focus on customer satisfaction which eventually translates into customer loyalty.

– Vikas Garg, Vice President of Operations and Technology