Storage systems are at the heart of modern media workflows where vast amounts of high-value assets are continuously read and written. Therefore, uptime and reliability are crucial for today’s media businesses. Our customers depend on seamless support to ensure that they can operate smoothly, and in this recent webinar, we decided to throw the spotlight on our unsung heroes—our technical support team—and explore how they operate behind the screens.
Moderated by Pete Watling, Senior Sales Director, at Perifery, the session featured Perifery’s support team: Joey D'Aguiar, Senior Manager; Morgan Jones, Technical Customer Engineer; and Joshua Wong, Senior Technical Customer Engineer.
A typical day at work for a technical support engineer
Pete kicked off the discussion by asking the team what a typical workday looks like for them. Joey said that they start the day by looking at the new tickets that have come in overnight. The team meets over a daily standup call where the head of development participates as well. The team reviews critical points from the previous day, examines pending and new items, prioritizes them, and determines their actions for the day.
Pete then asked the team about their approach to urgent, high-pressure issues. Josh responded by stating that the first thing they keep in mind is not to panic. They strive to gather as much information as possible about the situation from the customer and attempt to comprehend the necessary actions. Josh added that, at times, they get in touch with other teams who they believe might be more knowledgeable about the situation and provide better insights. The team prioritizes critical issues over other tasks. Morgan stressed the importance of teamwork and how consulting with teammates makes the work much simpler.
Delivering high performance when faced with challenges
Pete then asked the team about the biggest challenges that they face. Prioritizing issues and ensuring each issue receives the necessary time is often a challenging task, according to Morgan. He added that the team makes conscious efforts to ensure that they treat all customers issues fairly. While discussing the challenges he has encountered, Josh highlighted issues that initially appear straightforward but ultimately lead him down a deep rabbit hole involving multiple variables. Tracking all those variables down, doing multiple rounds of repeated testing, involving several people, and going back and forth with the customer is challenging—particularly when coming from a seemingly simple ticket. Morgan pitched in by saying that doing all these within a tight timeframe makes it even more challenging.
Josh added that integrating third-party tools is also quite challenging. He said that the customer invariably finds a tool that has not been tested by our teams—working with these new tools, testing and certifying them can be quite challenging.
When asked about a memorable case or ticket that they have worked on, Joey stated that the team frequently works on high-impact tickets, as storage is central to many media business workflows. Often, the storage vendor serves as their initial point of contact when they encounter new issues. He pointed to a recent case where the team investigated a customer issue only to determine that it was not storage-related and that the root cause lay elsewhere.
Ensuring high efficiency with best practices
Pete then asked the team what they believe is the most common misconception customers have about support. Joey quickly pointed out that customers’ expectations that the support team is free and ready to take on a new ticket as soon as it comes in is the most common misconception. “One thing that I've noticed in my time at Object Matrix, which is different from other support teams, is that we're ready and willing to connect remotely in our first-line investigations rather than just asking for log files to be sent over to be analysed, so we have a very hands-on approach,” he said.
When asked about how they ensure efficiency in resolving issues, Morgan opined those practices like strong communication among the team members, asking the right questions, and setting up remote sessions for troubleshooting help the team maintain high efficiency. Pete then asked about the proactive measures that are in place to prevent downtime-inducing issues from happening in the first place. Josh pointed out that remote monitoring tools installed at some customer sites send cluster metrics to the central server in Cardiff. This helps the team keep track of any errors that occur at the customer site. For instance, if a node has a failed drive, the team gets alerted right away so that they can raise a ticket on behalf of the customer, inform them about the situation, and send a replacement drive.
Joey added that the team keeps track of customers’ workflows as well. While doing so, the team gets to know if any third-party dependencies cause issues under certain circumstances. This information can be helpful when other customers come up against the same issue.
Pete took the opportunity to compliment the technical support team for being actively involved with the customer right from day one. He added that during the pre-sales process, when the solutions architects are evaluating the workflows, integrations, deployment, and training, the technical support team is always on top of any issues that pop up and resolves them quickly.
An effective feedback loop to keep the product evolving
Pete then asked the team about how their work and knowledge are fed back to the product as new feature requests and bug identifications or fixes. Joey mentioned that the technical support team meets weekly with solution architects, product management, and development teams to assess potential feature requests and identify product bugs based on the past week’s work. He added that as soon as they are available through the development and quality-assurance cycle, the technical support team will typically try and test it in their own operations-based environments before deploying it in customer environments.
Pete then asked the team about what they considered the best feedback they had received from a customer. Morgan pointed to a recent incident where a customer had accidentally deleted a file. When Morgan was able to restore the lost file, the customer was very grateful to the team for how quickly the activity was carried out. Josh spoke about a recent power issue-related incident faced by a customer in Bristol. Since Bristol is just about an hour from Cardiff, the team decided to hop in a car and get to the customer site to see what the issue was. On realizing that the power supply unit has been fried, the team decided to send spare hardware from Cardiff to Bristol over an Uber and get it fixed right away. “I think they were pretty happy with how quick and proactive we were and how we just gave an Uber driver a box full of power supplies just to hand deliver it to us,” said Josh.
Joey felt that the best feedback is often the most unexpected. He said that some of the most memorable feedback he has received is when customer representatives, several weeks and months after their support issue was fixed, meet the Object Matrix team at a trade show or a conference and speak about how good their technical support experience has been. He says such moments are “really magical moments.”. Pete and Morgan then stressed the importance of the feedback surveys that are sent out on the closing of tickets. The feedback surveys play a crucial role in helping the team identify the gaps in their service and improve the product.
When talking about the worst situation he has been in, Joey pointed out that any situation involving data loss is far from ideal. They are the situations that everyone tries to avoid. He added that although Object Matrix is structured to recover from such situations and has a good track record to prove the same, having dual protection in the form of disaster recovery solutions is the best way for customers to prevent data loss.
Pete concluded the discussion by mentioning a certification course offered at the Cardiff office for those interested in a deep dive into Object Matrix. The course would be a good way to learn about Object Matrix by interacting directly with the experts—the development and technical support teams. Morgan signed off by thanking all the customers of Object Matrix for their patience when faced with issues and for the efforts that they put in to understanding the product.
Learn more
To learn more about how Perifery is supporting the media industry with storage solutions that are tailored for modern-day media workflows, explore our case studies.
If you missed the live webinar, you can watch on-demand now.
