OwnBackup's Director of Customer Support, Gadi Vered, is an experienced Customer Support leader who has already made a big impact since joining our team in 2019. His process-oriented approach is helping advance our Support operations and maintain the reputation that earned OwnBackup over 300 five-star reviews in the Salesforce AppExchange and 4.7 stars on G2 Crowd.
Given his success behind the scenes, we were not at all surprised to hear that Gadi was recently recognized as the Silver 2021 Stevie winner for Customer Service Manager of the year. It’s worth noting that the Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service are considered one of the world’s top honors for customer service and contact center teams, and more than 2,300 nominations across several categories were considered in this year’s competition.
For those customers who haven’t had the pleasure of working with Gadi directly, we thought we’d give folks a chance to get to know him by sharing a conversation about the drivers for this great achievement.
Tell us a little bit about yourself. What was your background prior to joining OwnBackup?
I’ve been working in the Customer Support space for almost 15 years, focusing on responsibly scaling up Technical Support teams while preserving the utmost service level. Prior to OwnBackup, I worked with Vidyo, Pageflex, and Press-sense. Throughout my career, I’ve followed three guiding pillars: People, Processes, and Technology. I feel it’s the combination of these principles that have helped me lead strong, healthy Support departments that delight customers and provide added value across the organization.
What are some of the ways OwnBackup has exceeded customer support goals while scaling service?
OwnBackup's customer base has grown 150% in the last 18 months. In order to maintain our standard of excellence amid this rapid growth, we worked hard to implement several support best practices. For example, we ramped up self-service options for our clients by launching a new customer portal that integrates tightly with OwnBackup Recover as well as our Salesforce Service Cloud. This makes it easy for customers to submit and keep track of support cases, and find useful webinars, articles, and self-help videos.
Some might have noticed that we also added an in-app guidance widget to the OwnBackup Recover interface, which has helped in driving adoption and onboarding completion for new customers. Internally, we bolstered our roster to adjust service support hours for emerging markets such as Australia and New Zealand.
What are some of the best-in-class tools the OwnBackup support team uses to better serve customers?
Here at OwnBackup, we believe in using the best technology out there so our Customer Success Managers and Support Engineers are free to focus their energy on meeting customer needs. Our support stack is always evolving, but here are some examples of tools we love:
- Internet Creations: Apps from this Salesforce AppExchange partner help us reduce case administration tasks and increase team efficiency. For example, tools like their Case Merge Premium and Case Flags empower our team to handle more cases and better prioritize cases as our support volumes increase.
- Jira: Our amazing Salesforce Admins and R&D folks helped us implement a handy integration between Salesforce and Jira so that each team can operate in its respective workspace. This reduces our average time-to-resolution on customer tickets.
- PagerDuty: This is a great incident response system that helps our team adhere to strict SLA contracts and provide 24/7 support without missing a beat.
- Brainshark: Within our Learning Management System, we launched a digital ‘Support Boot Camp’ for new employees with enhanced training content, which helps us to quickly onboard Support team members and retain critical knowledge.
- Grammarly: We always want to be at our best when responding to customers, and this tool lets the team achieve a higher level of expression and grammar through their written communication.
- Calendly: During COVID-19, we knew we had to be more flexible in facilitating remote troubleshooting and onboarding sessions with customers. This scheduling app lets us do that, while also improving our case time-to-resolution metrics.
What customer service accomplishments are you most proud of?
I’m incredibly proud of all the unique ways we’ve been able to directly impact OwnBackup's SLA for customers. We take very seriously the responsibility to maintain and improve the company’s already-great reputation and retain our wonderful customer base. Since last year, that’s been especially challenging because of the global pandemic, which required many of our Support reps (and customers) to work remotely for the first time.
However, our Customer Success leadership team is passionate about delivering unmatched service. That helped motivate the team to go above and beyond and stay focused on making continuous improvements to our workflows. At the end of the day, this meant that our employees reached their target KPIs and delighted more customers. We were fortunate that we were able to keep our plans moving forward and reach the goals we had set at the start of the year. By continuing to invest in our people, processes, and technology, the benefits of our work certainly paid off—both for our customers and the company.
We are always looking for more skilled team members to help us provide the best possible service to OwnBackup's growing customer community. Learn about our current openings and working with OwnBackup by visiting our careers page.
About Own
Own is the leading data platform trusted by thousands of organizations to protect and activate SaaS data to transform their businesses. Own empowers customers to ensure the availability, security and compliance of mission-critical data, while unlocking new ways to gain deeper insights faster. By partnering with some of the world’s largest SaaS ecosystems such as Salesforce, ServiceNow and Microsoft Dynamics 365, Own enables customers around the world to truly own the data that powers their business.It’s their platform. It’s your data. Own it. Learn more at owndata.com.
Media Contact:
Aimée Leabon
VP, Communications
aimee.leabon@owndata.com
