At Heptio, our HKS offering is redefining the technical support experience.
When you hear the term “tech support” what comes to mind? Perhaps a group of early-career individuals who are pretty good with computers and software answering calls and responding to tickets. You may picture someone who is friendly, empathetic and measured on how quickly they will respond to you, when you make contact. While all of these attributes are fantastic, the key facet here is that you must initiate contact. Therefore, “tech support” is extremely reactive.
While not everyone loathes contacting technical support, too many people are often disappointed in the lack of scope, depth, technical expertise and ownership provided by the tech support individuals on the other end of the line. If Customer Service has evolved to “Customer Experience” what is the alternative to “Technical Support?”
Enter Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE).
At Heptio, we strive to treat our customers with the same level of proactive diligence and investment as if their environments were our own. To us, CRE means shifting the focus away from Support and into the emerging Site Reliability mindset, as inspired by the work Google pioneered. The guiding principles we use to advance our Heptio Kubernetes Subscription (HKS) include:
- Be proactive, not reactive. Connect with customers continuously to prevent production issues from occurring in the first place. CRE is based on a close partnership between the customer and Heptio.
- Drive customer insights into product innovation. Deeply understand the key issues our customers face and apply these key insights to our products and to the open source community.
- Synthesize key learnings. Our aspiration is to systematize a solution to any issue a customer might encounter, so the first time anyone encounters a production issue it is the last time anyone encounters it.
- Act as the gateway to the upstream community. We don’t want to solve a problem for one customer when we can solve it for the entire Kubernetes community.
- Work ourselves out of a job. Relentlessly automate and improve our technology with a focus on knowledge transfer. Our goal is to drive down the complexities of deploying and running Kubernetes so we can focus on adding value in higher impact technical areas.
- Invest in tooling. Use tools, such as Sonobuoy, to ensure customers avoid issues in the first place and to make it easier to determine causation when issues do occur.
These principles have guided Heptio into a space where we can advise our customers on best practices, offer proactive outreach and act as the key gateway to the Kubernetes community. We deeply understand the opportunity costs our customers are facing and we want to enable them to save time, reduce risk and install confidence so they can add real value; while we have their backs ensuring their environments have enterprise-grade reliability.
So what does this mean exactly?
While we are inspired by Google’s practices, our implementation has been customized to meet the needs of our customer base. Though our CRE team does handle inbound queries from customers in the form of tickets (traditional technical support) it is not core to their work. We allocate the lion’s share of each CRE’s time to:
- Engaging in proactive outreach, such as working with customers to build upgrade plans that include a full review of their Kubernetes environment, core dependencies and rollback plan.
- Analyzing the key drivers of operational cost and complexity, and advocating for product improvements to further solve enterprise use cases.
- Developing thought leadership and tactical content.
- Interacting with the Kubernetes community.
We believe this approach evolves the concept of Technical Support into a function that continuously resolves customer issues through product innovation. The CRE team has the latitude to deeply understand the customer’s environment and responsibility to ensure reliability.
What now? You can learn more about HKS by going here and in case you are interested in joining our CRE team, we are hiring!