The customer is king — that’s the credo of many companies. At Retarus, our philosophy is “customer first”. And when it comes to IT Support and Operations, there are numerous challenges to be mastered.
It starts as early as IT Support, which at Retarus is part of IT Delivery. Many existing customers don’t keep the details of our services’ implementation top of mind — once they have been set up correctly, ongoing maintenance is minimal. Years later, however, a problem can arise and colleagues originally involved in the implementation may no longer be working at the company.
This makes it all the more important to have professional support technicians who can steer the customer in the right direction by asking specific questions right from the start. Retarus Support employs only “Retarians” — in-house employees, not external service providers — at the various levels and in numerous locations. It’s the only way to ensure that the customer is in good hands from the very beginning. Furthermore, any queries that could arise are able to be quickly resolved and with the highest level of quality.
If a request is too complex for the regular support team to resolve, many companies begin a nerve-wracking game of ping pong: sending internal queries from service experts/IT operations (ITO) to support, then to the customer, and often with lots of back and forth. This process may go quickly because a service level agreement (SLA) is in place, but it is often very stressful for the customer and doesn’t increase employee satisfaction.
To answer these types of complex customer queries not only quickly, but also as competently as possible, Retarus IT has a special department that acts as the link between the regular support team and IT operations.
Application Support is staffed by experienced and communicative engineers who specialize in the various service areas and are directly connected with the customer to solve problems quickly and efficiently. If questions arise, they can also communicate directly with the development and product teams. This enables us to report and prioritize even complex issues such as bugs or feature requests in the most customer-oriented way possible. As a result, our products are always attuned to the customer’s needs and are continuously developed in line with demand.
Another special feature of Application Support is that it also takes on various DevOps tasks such as software release management. In these times of CI/CD, it is becoming increasingly difficult to accurately predict how a deployment will impact the customer. Application Support’s expertise and ability to stay synced with customers allows Retarus to better assess potential risks posed by a new release and proactively communicate relevant information in advance.
From the customer’s perspective, large cloud providers often seem like a black box when an incident occurs. At Retarus, thankfully, customers are informed directly by IT Operations via status.io in the event of an incident. Here, too, Retarus’ customers-first approach — an approach taken by every employee — is on display, highlighting the benefit of IT Operations staying closely connected to the customer.
Moreover, an incident at Retarus does not end in silent restoration of the service. Often within fewer than five working days, impacted customers automatically receive a detailed root cause analysis with clear measures to prevent a recurrence. After all, what cloud service providers use is still just IT, which can sometimes be buggy or cause problems. But this is precisely how customers find out whether or not they have a reliable partner at their side after they relinquish control to the cloud.
Retarus does everything it can to be this reliable partner.
*Sascha Ludeck is Head of Application Support at Retarus.
