The Personal Touch in Managed Services
It’s an old axiom: Technology companies tend to focus on their offering rather than the people using it. As a result, they ignore the underlying problems that their customers need to solve.
Media Temple has been helping customers migrate their business-critical sites and apps to the cloud since 2015. Our Amazon Web Services (AWS) Customer Success Program enables our customers to take full advantage of the cloud while removing as much complexity as possible. Our team’s focus is on simplicity, which focuses on a single concept:
Technology is complex. Business is complex. Life is complex. If we’re simplifying one or more, we’re doing our job.
But how do we simplify things? For starters, we take a holistic view of our customer’s business, and ensure the service perfectly matches their needs.
Cloud Experts Not Required
Since day one, Media Temple customers are empowered to focus on growing their businesses and not managing their servers or cloud instances. That focus holds true today – in fact, over 80% of our customers had absolutely no cloud computing experience before partnering with Media Temple. We often hear from customers that they’ve always wanted to leverage the power and scale of the cloud but felt they didn’t have the time to learn everything they needed to know.
During onboarding, our expertise becomes our customers’ expertise. A critical part of our onboarding program is learning both the customer’s expectations and experiences with the cloud. We enable our customers to become knowledgeable cloud users by including the most relevant cloud concepts into a tailored cloud education program that directly aligns with their needs.
With its ever-growing platform of technologies, AWS has seemingly infinite ways to solve even the most simplistic problems. But in most cases our customers only need to understand a handful of key concepts and products to make confident, informed decisions about their cloud strategy.
This approach has dramatically minimized the time in which our customers start to fully realize the full power, scale, and cost savings of the cloud without overwhelming them with a ton of cool, but potentially unnecessary knowledge. Our focus is on empowering the person, not just the technology.
Focus on the practical
Oftentimes, we hear from our customers that their previous managed service partners required a lot from them. They’d have to do their homework, put together a plan of action, and provide clear instruction on what needed to be done. From there, the plan would be executed without consideration for technical sustainability or cost implication.
‘Solid performance and a hard-working team – that actually cares about its customers – behind the scenes.’ – Patrick Wilson, CTO, Longbeard Creative
While we’ve worked on architecting and building innovative solutions for interesting use cases, most of the best solutions prioritize practical reasoning with tactical planning and implementation. Media Temple’s approach to solving technical problems relies on knowing our customer’s key business objectives or, more simply, what they are trying to achieve. From there, we provide one or more options, explaining the pros and cons of each approach and working with them to make the best decision for their business. Our focus on collaboration means that even after the solution is implemented, the communication channels are still open and ready.
Runbooks to keep you running
After we’ve created an optimized cloud environment, the next priority is to keep the customer running. The best way to do that? Comprehensive documentation of every change in a runbook, with a focus on the outcome of each change.
Our team is responsible for documenting all conversations about changes to an AWS environment in a customized runbook for each customer. This history of an environment’s evolution ensures that Media Temple’s Support Team tracks what has changed and, more importantly, why that change was implemented. It also contains detailed instructions on how certain issues should be handled; who to contact; which processes, sites, or applications are mission-critical, and any other critical information.
By keeping this documentation concise, accurate, and readily available, Media Temple can respond to and remediate issues quickly, which translates into consistently high uptime and performance metrics for every customer.
Take the guesswork out of optimization
Most managed AWS partners provide a dashboard with fancy graphs and numbers for customers to decipher on their own. But we have found that customers want insight and analysis that leads to actionable measures for optimization, not raw data.
The Customer Success team at Media Temple provides every customer with an expert who can pull insights from this data to put together a plan of action. Our Service Delivery Managers meet with the customer and their teams on a regular basis to review the data collected about the IT stacks that are implemented, using a number of tools to track infrastructure performance, cost, usage, and security. From this data, we can offer practical recommendations on how to improve the cloud’s performance to directly align with the key business objectives we’ve outlined together with the customer. Every new implementation comes with metrics for success. If we do not see the numbers moving in the right direction, we go back to the drawing board and come up with a new plan.
This close collaboration is one of the key factors for increasing confidence in customers who are adopting a more cloud-centric view of their business.
Holistic Support
Much like there are a wide variety of options that can be exercised when building in the AWS Cloud, there are a large number of ways a Managed Services Partner can approach service and support.
Our holistic approach to our customers’ needs is the key to providing a fantastic cloud experience. Growing businesses can experience challenges when implementing new technologies, and the Media Temple team empowers our customers to become confident cloud users.
It all comes down to this simple philosophy: If this were our business, how would we want it done?
Learn more about Managed Services for AWS from Media Temple, today.
