Lessons in CPaaS Technology Leadership — How Plivo Takes Care of Our Customers

13 Jan 2021

Ask any of our customers — Plivo offers a great communications platform as a service (CPaaS). Using a cloud platform for communication services beats maintaining your own infrastructure. When you use a cloud CPaaS provider, you don’t need to buy and maintain expensive equipment, or handle carrier relationships in-house. You also don’t need expensive expert developers to keep the software updated.

But even when you choose the simplicity of a cloud platform, nobody gets up to speed right away, and everyone bumps up against roadblocks now and then. When you hit one of those speed bumps, you need knowledgeable tech support — and that’s an area where Plivo shines.

Excellent support was critical for Deckers Brands, a California-based footwear retailer that sells products in more than 50 countries. It needed a way to automate order and shipping status messages, and turned to Plivo for its ability to reliably send a high volume of SMS messages. Rollout went smoothly, says Deckers’ Jacob Martinez, but there were times when the team needed a little hand-holding. “Anytime we’ve ever reached out to Plivo for any questions, we’ve gotten responses quickly and with answers that make sense,” Martinez says.

We hear a lot of feedback like that. In this post, part of an ongoing blog series in which we highlight lessons learned from challenges we’ve faced and how we have turned them into opportunities for success, we talk about how our personalized onboarding assistance helps customers get up and running quickly and our support keeps them successful.

Personalized onboarding assistance

Getting started with new software can be tough. With a platform as comprehensive as Plivo, it can be difficult to figure out how to start. We’ve developed quickstart guides for our Messaging API, Voice API, and SIP trunking, but sometimes you can make progress faster when you talk to another human being.

That’s why Plivo provides personalized assistance to all new customers at no extra cost. A Plivo solutions engineer works with each customer’s dev team to lay out requirements, guide them through implementation, weigh in on a testing plan, and help with debugging if necessary. When the customer is ready to go live, the SE and our support team take special note so they can handle anything urgent. We stay available for as much time as it takes for the customer to prepare for launch. After launch we assign each customer a customer success manager to provide ongoing assistance and advice.

A consultative approach to support

We’re still here for you after you’ve gotten up and running. When you need help, the first thing you can turn to is our documentation, which provides concept tutorials, getting started documents, how-to guides, and reference materials.

If you still have questions, you can visit our support portal, support.plivo.com. It provides resources to answer frequently asked questions, implementation guides, and details about all the elements of Plivo’s platform.

Even the best documentation and online support, however, can’t solve all problems. That’s why we offer a range of support plans to meet any organization’s needs, from a free basic plan that provides access to support engineers 24x7 to premium support that comes with a three-hour service-level agreement (SLA). Businesses that need assistance can gain access to dedicated solution engineers for guidance on complex integrations and issue resolution. Plivo is one of the few CPaaS providers that offers technical support on a one-on-one, per-customer basis.

Our support team provides you with all the technical guidance you need, as you need it. In fact, we pride ourselves on white-glove customer support. To us, that means keeping an eye on how you’re doing and reaching out when we see a problem. It means having a positive, can-do attitude. We understand that glitches can be frustrating, so we do our best to offer solutions quickly. Our support team is made up of genuinely nice people who are strongly motivated to help customers and know a lot about our platform. So even though you may run into a snag, we’re usually able to get you past it quickly and with a smile on your face. We’re not saying you’ll be calling us just to chat with the support team — but we’re not saying you won’t.

Ensuring customer success

Our commitment to our customers doesn’t end when their systems are working. To help you get the most from us, we want to know about your business and how you use Plivo. We provide every customer with a dedicated customer success contact who acts as their organization’s personal ambassador. Your customer success manager will get to know you and your business issues. They can suggest solutions. They can hold your hand over carrier connectivity, billing, and renewal issues. They’ll keep you in the loop about new Plivo solutions and policies. And they’ll act as your advocate with other Plivo team members.

Our customer success team has a great track record of keeping customers happy. They’re one of our not-so-secret weapons in our mission to provide superlative customer experience.

Our relationships carry the day

With telecommunications, not all problems come from the customer side of the connection. Often businesses have issues with carrier networks and connectivity, and sometimes you have to deal with the carriers to fix things. But you shouldn’t have to — you should be able to rely on your API provider to troubleshoot and resolve issues from end to end.

Plivo customers know that we’ll get them back in business quickly. Our support teams can take the lead in troubleshooting network issues. We have direct carrier relationships with dozens of telecom providers around the world, and dedicated in-house teams for each country’s providers. They understand the complex telco laws and regulations, which means we can resolve issues faster than API vendors that have to rely on aggregators, gateway providers, and resellers.

The ultimate goal of CPaaS tech support is uptime. Plivo guarantees 99.99% API uptime on all its services, and you can see how well we meet that promise on our status page. Go on, take a look — we’re proud of our record. Or ask our customers, who’ll tell you things like, “The support team is commendable in terms of the time to respond and the quality of response.”

We’re proud when we hear comments like that, and we hold ourselves accountable to delivering that kind of high-quality support to all of our customers. Everyone at Plivo cares about your success. Our positive, proactive approach to customer service makes us stand out from our competitors.

Learn more about our new support plans and how they might help your team.

ICYMI, read the first post in our Lessons in CPaaS Technology Leadership blog series, Our Own Carrier Network Matters.