Tell me if this story sounds familiar: I recently contacted my service provider to fix a broadband connection issue in my home. That was followed by almost an hour of waiting on hold, then, when the issue was escalated, waiting for callbacks from multiple customer support representatives, all of whom asked for the very same information multiple times. The problem was eventually resolved, but it was a time-consuming and thoroughly frustrating experience that left me questioning whether or not I should change providers.
There’s an important lesson here. Delivering a superior support experience is key to building brand loyalty and customer retention. That’s exactly why certain organizations offer white glove services to their customers. From an IT support perspective, such services typically involve a premium support contract and an army of engineers on call to rapidly address any issues. And yet, while customers value the speed of response and personalized experience, this type of white glove service is essentially reactive – the troubleshooting occurs only when things have already failed.
HPE Nimble Storage support, on the other hand, is a white glove experience in which 90% of the time, you don’t even have to call us because we’ve already predicted and addressed an issue before you were even aware of it. And if you do have to contact technical support, your call is directly picked up (in less than a minute) by a Level 3 technical support engineer (TSE) with deep expertise in storage, servers, OSS, hypervisors, and applications. The TSE has all the tools at his or her disposal to fix your issue quickly – typically in under 45 minutes – with rapid root cause analysis that eliminates days (and sometimes months) of troubleshooting, not just on your storage array but across your entire infrastructure stack.
This is white glove support redefined. It’s a world class support experience that you uniquely get – as standard – as an HPE Nimble Storage customer.
Transforming the support experience
Since its inception ten years ago, Nimble Storage has maintained a laser focus on providing the industry’s most enviable support experience.
From the outset, we had two guiding principles that differentiated Nimble Storage support from our incumbent competitors. First, “Don’t change the customer, make the product better.” We recognized that the customer’s support experience is directly related to the supportability of the product. Second, “Never debug the same issue twice.” Simply put, if we discover an issue – whether it be from our support lab, QA lab, or directly from a customer – we’re not going to let the issue affect any other customer. By inoculating our installed base for known problems, we avoid future support cases and solve the harder support cases faster. Reflect on this for a moment. Consider how beneficial it would be if we could identify and treat specific people who are susceptible to a virus before they are infected by it? Imagine how healthy the world’s population would be if we had that capability?
To accomplish these goals and avoid the pitfalls of traditional support structures, Nimble Storage pioneered the use of artificial intelligence and predictive analytics with HPE InfoSight. Since 2010, HPE InfoSight has analyzed more than 1,250 trillion data points from over 150,000 systems across the infrastructure stack – and that has saved customers more than 1.5 million hours of lost productivity.[1] Leveraging advanced machine learning to predict and prevent 86% of problems before customers even realize they have an issue,[2] HPE InfoSight’s intelligence goes beyond storage to provide deep insights into virtual infrastructure that improve application performance and optimize resources.
The HPE Nimble Storage approach to predictive analytics has completely reimagined the support experience. Predictive support automation enables HPE Nimble Storage to eliminate Level 1 and Level 2 support, providing customers with direct access to expert Level 3 support engineers and removing time‑consuming and frustrating escalations. The result is 73% fewer support tickets, 85% less time spent resolving storage-related trouble tickets, and 69% faster time to resolution for events that necessitate Level 3 support.[3]
Intelligence changes everything
We’re proud of the support experience that we’ve created for Nimble, and the benefits for our customers – as shown in the chart below – have been game-changing. Think about it this way: in the last five years, our installed base has experienced 743% growth. During the same period – thanks to HPE InfoSight – the number of manual support cases per array has decreased by almost 64%!
Source: internal study of HPE Nimble Storage’s installed base
Check out HPE Nimble Storage support in action
Here’s a great example of the power of HPE Nimble Storage support. A Nimble customer was experiencing massive application slow down, with 10X lower throughput and higher latency after updating their NimbleOS. Nimble Storage L3 support – using data from HPE InfoSight – was quickly able to diagnose the root cause as a bug in the hypervisor which was sending the array an illegal iSCI response that was causing excessive retries. We were able to rapidly create a workaround for the customer until the hypervisor vendor fixed the bug.
Applying the “see once, prevent for all” approach enabled by HPE InfoSight global learning, we then applied a signature pattern-matching algorithm to see who else in our installed base could be susceptible. HPE InfoSight identified over 600 systems and blacklisted that version of NimbleOS from each system’s update path, preventing and protecting those customers from experiencing the same issue.
Delivering a support experience you’ll love
HPE Nimble Storage reimagines enterprise storage with a unique solution that simplifies IT and unlocks enterprise agility across the storage lifecycle – from install to upgrade. It transforms operations with artificial intelligence and delivers an experience that our customers truly love – as you can see in this video.
Our unique white glove support experience is a key driver for why our customers are so fanatical about HPE Nimble Storage. Here’s a selection of some of the unsolicited feedback that we receive from our customers on a regular basis:
Stefan Floyhar, Sr. Manager, IT Infrastructure Engineering at Ferrara Candy Company summed it up when he described HPE Nimble Storage support as “probably the greatest support organization I’ve worked with in 20 years of IT.” Go here to see how HPE InfoSight has transformed the support experience at Ferrara candy.
Imagine: industry-best support that eliminates the complexity of traditional support models while delivering a dramatically different experience that you’ll actually love. That’s HPE Nimble Storage.
For more information, please check out the following resources:
Assessing the Financial Impact of HPE InfoSight Predictive Analytics
[1] HPE Insight: Artificial Intelligence for Autonomous Infrastructure
[2] Assessing the Financial Impact of HPE Nimble Storage Powered by HPE InfoSight, ESG, May 2019
[3] Assessing the Financial Impact of HPE Nimble Storage Powered by HPE InfoSight, ESG, May 2019