Team as a Service – The Importance of Support in Infrastructure Services

What is the core principle of support, according to Chris Grosspietsch, Senior Manager of Advocacy Operations at Zendesk? He says the core principle of support is to serve as a place where people can go to get help. But how did the pandemic reshape the world of support and how do we handle it at Bigstep?

Support: Pandemic Edition

Businesses of all types, sizes, and locations have been impacted by COVID-19 in different ways: some encountered problems, while others have accelerated their move to digitalization. Both situations have led to surges in support requests worldwide, as the virus continued to spread. Overall, weekly support requests are now up 24% globally compared to the same period last year, according to Zendesk.

A higher number of support tickets, however, doesn’t mean more problems. Firstly, tickets are raised not only when problems arise, but also for additional questions and help with certain services from professionals. Who else to help you move forward if not the people who best know the product? Secondly, a study by Zendesk showed that the more tickets a company has, the more it organizes the requests and automatizes its support systems.

How Important Is B2B Support?

Great support is important for all kinds of customers; B2C services usually have a larger customer base and need to offer assistance on various platforms, such as social media, live chat, e-mail, or tickets, in order to make it as easy and as comfortable as possible for customers to reach the support team.

For B2B, on the other hand, it’s important to have a really well-built system, so as to solve the most critical problems in the shortest time, while also keeping note and solving smaller requests that arise simultaneously. Since B2B companies generally have smaller customer bases, and the business of the customer is directly affected, the customer expects to be dealt with quickly, and with prompt solutions.

According to a research done by Salesforce, 63 percent of consumers expect businesses to know their unique needs and expectations, while the percentage is even higher for B2B buyers, reaching as much as 76 percent.

Support for B2B Server Infrastructure

The servers and the networking system represent the backbone of any business. No server and no networking means no website, app, or big data project running properly for your business. If you’re not that technical and you have a small team, you probably need help in setting up certain infrastructure services.

At Bigstep, we are very experienced with all types of customer requests for bare metal servers.

Don’t know how to provision a server or even a more advanced setup such as a load balancer? We do.

Don’t know how to configure a certain service, such as FTP or DNS? We do.

Don’t know how to change some settings, or how to add new users or e-mail accounts?

Don’t know how to install a big data tool? We do, and we will. For you.

Need assistance with errors in your big data clusters? We can help with this also.

Managed and Unmanaged Services

You can opt for managed or unmanaged services and benefit from live chat, ticketing, and e-mail support, which are available 24/7.

When you choose managed services at Bigstep, you receive full support in the installation, configuration, and troubleshooting of your bare metal servers, as well as timely security and threat assessment. Our team provisions bare metal servers instantly, so you can start working on your project as fast as possible. Provisioning a server usually takes only a few minutes.

Since we design, build, and maintain your high performance, resilient infrastructure, you can turn all your focus on developing and improving your website, app, or analytics projects. This enables you to react quickly to the changing business environment, while we take care of the infrastructure layer, securely.

As an extra service we offer, our technical engineers are here to help you efficiently solve specific problems when they arise, such as:

• Architecture changes, provisioning new services, or security management;
• Backup and disaster recovery configuration;
• Technical consultancy for architecture design and performance optimization.

Additional Bigstep Metal Cloud Features

We have remote monitoring systems in place as well as notifications. In the rare event of a hardware failure, the faulty component is replaced instantly due to our drag and drop UI. We can easily replace a defective server with minimal downtime and without the need for physical interaction with it.

We are also using redundant systems so that if one breaks down, there’s no need to immediately replace it. Redundancy can be used for all services, such as servers, drives, databases, networking, and more.

In case you experience traffic surges or high infrastructure load, you can benefit from our scalability features, which allow increasing or decreasing hardware resources as needed.

Meet Our Team

Our Support Team consists of three layers of support. Besides this, we also have specialized dedicated engineers in specific fields such as storage and networking. We strive to answer your tickets and requests as quickly as possible, and we constantly make sure your infrastructure is always up and running, to ensure business continuity for you and all of our customers.

Tell us what you need; we already know what to do to solve the situation in the shortest time possible. We even have an offer going on at the moment: get one of our managed services packages, and you can buy your bare metal server with up to 50% discount. More details about the offer here.