Posted on 4.6.2018

How we provide the best support for the fastest cloud

UpCloud team

‘World’s fastest cloud servers’ has been our long-standing slogan, but we are also proud to provide our users with world-class customer support. How do we achieve this and what effects have we seen since we began offering an always-available support service? Read on as we introduce you to what goes on behind the scenes.

Customer support for growth

We have numerous support related conversations including emails, chats, and phone calls every month. According to our statistics since the beginning of the year, around 1% of our users contact support per day.

Our current monthly conversation volume is growing at a rate of +20% with +30% more messages sent per month.

With many new users signing up daily, the need for support is also ever increasing. The number of conversations has grown by an average of 20% per month. At the same time, the amount of individual messages is also growing, currently accounting for an average of 4 messages per conversation.

Responsiveness is satisfaction

One of the most important factors in creating a great customer support experience is how quickly we can acknowledge issues. We realised that the time between the user sending us an email to them getting the first reply essentially leaves the user in stressful uncertainty where the issue exists but nobody is actively resolving it.

We suspected that user satisfaction could be greatly improved by eliminating this moment of “limbo” and uncertainty. Actually resolving the issue can sometimes take a moment, but as long as the user knows we are hard at work, they feel much more at ease.

You can’t improve what you don’t measure.

With hard work, we’ve managed to cut our initial response time down to only 6 minutes, which we are very happy about! This means that you only have to wait 6 minutes on average when first getting in touch with us. As an even better metric for our performance, any follow up responses are yet faster with just around 2 minutes between replies.

We also track our users’ satisfaction by kindly asking them to rate their support experience at the end of conversations. While we are happy with our current satisfaction rating of 88%, we aim to raise this to above 90% before the end of this quarter.

The building blocks of success

To be able to best serve our users from all around the world, we need to be just as diverse. Our team consists of multiple different nationalities with various backgrounds, whom all are highly trained in various technical fields, together working around the clock from our four offices in Helsinki, London, Seattle and Singapore. Having teams around the world bring a special aspect of multiculturality to our everyday interactions.

Along with our regional offices across the world come the challenges and advantages of time zones. Thanks to having our teams situated on three different continents, we are able to provide 24/7 customer support without the need for night shifts. The teams pass the torch on to the next by following the sun so to speak.

In the end, we are here to provide our users with the world’s greatest support for the world’s greatest cloud. As always, don’t hesitate to get in contact with any questions or issues you might have.

Best regards,

Arttu Uskali
Head of Support

Test hosting on UpCloud!

Arttu Uskali

  1. […] in Chicago. We also recently opened up our fourth office, this time in Seattle, to ensure that our excellent technical support is available in every region and around the clock. As we continue building our team and […]

  2. hi my problem is when i run the another application which says host “hostname” is not allowed to connect to this mysql server. Can you please explain me why this error comes . The host is the qa server running with mysql

  3. Janne Ruostemaa

    Hi there, thanks for the question. We’ve got some troubleshooting tips for MySQL databases, but on a quick glance, it sounds like your database is to bind to localhost or 127.0.0.1 only which prevents accessing it from another host.

  4. Hi Team,

    I have installed mysql db on separate host for my zabbix application.
    zabbix-server =server1
    zabbix-database(mysql)=server2
    while connecting from server1 to server2 using mysql -u zabbix -p -h server2
    it is asking for password but after entering correct password still there is no further progess. Even am not getting mysql prompt as well. But when am login to mysql from locally it is working fine. remotely it is not working. please assist.

  5. Hey there, thanks for the question. Since your database needs to be accessed remotely, you need to make sure that your MySQL databases has the correct bind-address. It is set to localhost by default in some distros so you need to change this to allow remote access. If you need more information about this, you can find more troubleshooting tips in our guide How to fix common problems with MySQL databases.

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