“It’s Not Our Product. It’s Our People”: BlueCat’s Secret to Success

If you consider what’s at the heart of BlueCat’s success, you’ll realize quickly that you’re asking the wrong question. The question is not what drives our success, but rather who.

The answer is our people. Our users, our Care Community, and everyone in between. “Making something as complex and powerful as Adaptive DNS succeed within an organization demands a partnership, not just a product sale,” says VP of Customer Care Petrisa Pecnik.

Some organizations take the human side of their business for granted. We know the people using our products are just as important as the products themselves. That’s why we make sure to foster and support our customer relationships.

BlueCat’s Customer Care Team  

In fact, we value our customers so much that we won a couple of awards for it. Our Customer Care has won 6 awards in the past year alone, listed below.

Here’s how we did it:

We’re flexible.

Here’s a true story Last year, one of our new customers, an energy provider, came to us with a critical, time-sensitive issue during the holidays. Their household meters, which are IP-enabled to communicate energy consumption to their billing department, were incorrectly logging energy usage. It had to do with the meters being assigned different IP addresses each time they connected to the network, which mixed up the billing department.

To fix their issue, we customized our product so that each meter was married to a single address, and flew our system engineers on-site to ensure a smooth migration.

“[We] engaged BlueCat to work through a critical issue that could have negatively impacted the ability to bill customers. BlueCat provided the best customer service I have ever experienced in my 30 years in IT. Their willingness to dig into the issue, to understand our business processes as well as how their equipment was being used, etc. was phenomenal.” -Engineering Director, leading energy company

We listen.

Our Care Portal has a number of golden resources, but when we learned users were having trouble navigating it, we updated our entire interface and built in a smart search tool. By customizing search functionality within our Portal, our customers can now resolve about ⅕ of their questions without needing to open a case. The smart search also gives users access to an entire library of crowdsourced answers from other users, allowing them to work through common issues with their peers.

“BlueCat Networks has a very active user community in their online Care Portal, featuring valuable contributions from customers worldwide.” -A user at a leading Canadian university

We put it all out there.

We make a conscious decision to use a “many-to-many” approach, ensuring our knowledge base is thoroughly documented, accurate, transparent, and shared. Our Support Team extensively researches every issue submitted to them and documents solutions in succinct articles for all BlueCat customers. We also opened up the floor to our Care Portal users, allowing them to post and respond to questions, forum-style.

We know what we were doing.

We’re proud to say our Customer Care team grew by 38% last year alone, but we don’t go easy on prepping and training them.We put every single member through a 16-week certification process – it’s more than a just checking a box. In this certification, we empower Care members to deliver consistent and reliable support by equipping them with knowledge of BlueCat products, solutions, and more. Following that, our Care team continuously participates in learning initiatives that include mentorship from fellow experienced team members.

“BlueCat’s onboarding process was phenomenal. We were given a comfortable amount of time to learn and practice the material… we were able to revisit topics more than once, to increase the knowledge we absorb each time. All in all, I was very appreciative of this training program.” -Nathan Chan, newly certified Care team member

We lift people up.

There’s a reason we call it a Care Community. We know that BlueCat users are real people with career aspirations, goals, and like-minded colleagues. That’s why we incorporated a community forum, run regular user groups, and upstarted an Ambassador of the Month award, in which we celebrate a uniquely valuable member of our community for their contributions.

We’re proactive.

Just like Adaptive DNS is a proactive network move (from both a security and infrastructure perspective), our Care team doesn’t like to sit around and wait for problems to arise. It’s why we run annual health checks on customers’ systems, quarterly check-ins, and weekly touchpoint sync-ups. By taking that time to think ahead, or look back for patterns, we can help prevent future issues.

We build a tribe.

It’s one thing to have a dedicated support team member. It’s a whole other to have a team behind you. At BlueCat, we take a team-based approach to Care and have at least three people of varying seniority levels our customers can reach out to.  

Awards

Silver

1. Customer Service Training Team of the Year: Customer Care Training
2. Customer Service Team of the Year – Recovery Situation: BlueCat’s Smart Meter Recovery
3. Award for Innovation in Customer Service: BlueCat Care Solutions
4. Customer Service Department of the Year – Computer Software – 100 or More Employees: BlueCat Networks, Toronto, ON Canada

Bronze

1. Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year  – Computer Hardware & Software – 100 or More Employees: BlueCat Enterprise Support
2. Best Use of Technology in Customer Service: BlueCat Care Portal