BlueCat’s world-class customer care recognized by the 2020 Stevie® Awards

At BlueCat, our culture code informs everything we do. We know it makes us better teammates for each other and better service providers for our customers. While our values have led to numerous awards for our culture, customer service accolades mean the most to us.  They demonstrate the benefits of our constant commitment to customers.

Sponsored by the American Business Awards organization, the Stevie® Awards recognize accomplishments and contributions of companies and businesses from all over the world. This year we are the proud recipients of four 2020 Stevie® Awards.

Back-Office Customer Service Professional of the Year – Technology Industries

• BRONZE STEVIE® WINNER: Jubin George, Automation Support Manager

Young Customer Service Professional of the Year – Technology Industries

• BRONZE STEVIE® WINNER: Alex Zamyatin, Enterprise Support Analyst

Customer Service Manager of the Year

• SILVER STEVIE® WINNER: John Shek, Technical Support Manager

Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Software – 100 or More Employees

• BRONZE STEVIE® WINNER: BlueCat Networks

To have some fun, we surprised Jubin, Alex, and John with the news. And we got it all on video here:

There are many outstanding individuals that make up our Customer Care team and we want to share their stories. Here are excerpts from each winner’s application. Take a look. It’s not hard to see why they’ve been recognized as world-class customer care professionals.

Back-Office Customer Service Professional of the Year – Technology Industries

BRONZE STEVIE® WINNER: Jubin George, Automation Support Manager

Customer Success created a back-office team dedicated to automating repetitive tasks for our support engineers, as well as providing support for our customers who are also automating manual activities in their daily operations. 

The Automation Support team is managed by Jubin George, who started off as a front-line support engineer himself. Over the past year, he leveraged his strong leadership abilities, first-hand experience as a support engineer, and his new skills in developing automation to guide several new initiatives within the team.

This past year, Jubin developed and implemented an automated pattern analysis algorithm which parses system log data in minutes versus hours.  It also compares logs and behaviors within a customer environment against known error patterns. With the pattern analysis algorithm, our support engineers now complete the troubleshooting phase of deployments 30% faster than before. Additionally, the algorithm let the support engineers proactively spot other issues that the customers were not even aware of and address them before they interrupted the services within the customer’s organization. 

Young Customer Service Professional of the Year – Technology Industries

BRONZE STEVIE® WINNER: Alex Zamyatin, Enterprise Support Analyst

In 2017, Alex Zamyatin joined BlueCat at 22 years old as a Technical Support Engineer within the Customer Success department.

He later began to manage one of our largest enterprise retail accounts. They were using a legacy version of BlueCat software that was no longer supported. This made things complicated for Alex because he could not follow any traditional troubleshooting or operational protocols. After running many tests, it was confirmed that their environment was not suitable for an upgrade; however, he was determined to find a workaround. Alex gathered a team of his peers to help brainstorm a solution and they began working to deliver a successful upgrade within the customer’s off hours maintenance window. After many failed tests, the result of incomplete information or unknowns in the customer environment and numerous trips back to the drawing board, the team was able to successfully upgrade the account under Alex’s leadership.

Customer Service Manager of the Year

SILVER STEVIE® WINNER: John Shek, Technical Support Manager

In 2014, John Shek joined the Customer Success department as a support engineer; yet, his rapid advancement between roles did not surprise anyone. He soon become a Technical Support Manager, managing our remote technical support teams.

John identified a shift in the marketplace. Given the position of our mission critical software in the network stack, customers needed the support team to better understand their environment and how BlueCat software connected with the rest of ecosystem. To address this, John found a new vendor that could provide 24/7 support for our immensely technical customer base. In less than 6 months, John created a selection process and was able to successfully onboard the chosen new partner with no interruption. The previous vendor was able to exit early and John developed a seamless coverage plan with the new partner, arranging additional resources within BlueCat to start 2 months earlier than expected.

Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Software – 100 or More Employees

BRONZE STEVIE® WINNER: BlueCat Networks

BlueCat’s enterprise support engineers are split into teams with dedicated engineers assigned to a specific customer portfolio. One of those teams, Team Odyssey, are front-line representatives who actively adhere to the BlueCat Customer Care mission. In total, the team manages thirty-two large enterprise accounts — eight of which are Fortune 100 companies.

Last year, Team Odyssey lead an initiative to foster closer relationships with each customer. To do this, they limited the number of accounts which an individual member could oversee. The trade-off between quantity and quality was illustrated through a decrease in the average minutes taken to respond to an enterprise support case. In spring, the average time taken to respond to an enterprise support case was 16 minutes. By the winter, the average time dropped to 7 minutes.

Throughout this change, Team Odyssey maintained their proactive approach towards customers. To assure stability, the team conducts regular proactive health checks on customer environments. These checks are relatively time-consuming and require a great level of attention; however, the checks can identify potential threats that could lead to future issues.

 An example of this occurred in June 2019 when an enterprise customer had unresolved external zones. The issue caused one of their secondary web pages to become inaccessible to the public which the customer was not aware of. The customer was extremely thankful for the support engineer’s actions because this issue could have left several detrimental effects on the company if it were to progress in silence.