At Snowflake, putting the customer first is an essential company value. But “customer-centric” is more than just a buzzword: We use a data-driven, outside-in lens on everything we do, at all levels of the company. In particular, here’s how Snowflake Support is listening to you—our customers—and continuously improving the Snowflake customer experience at every touchpoint.
Across the Snowflake Support team, part of the Product organization that includes Engineering and Product Management, we know that our primary role is to be a customer advocate, with the goal of creating a better customer experience. But again, that’s more than a concept. We hold ourselves accountable to Snowflake customers in very specific ways:
- We are constantly shaping our operations to receive feedback and act upon real-time customer input.
- We are continuously improving alignment with our teammates across Snowflake’s Product team as we partner together to prioritize the customer experience.
- We make sure critical discussions leverage data from our customers.
As of July 2021, Snowflake’s NPS score, which measures customer experience and brand loyalty, was 68—more than three times the industry average of 21 for B2B technology providers based on the 2018 Tech Vendor NPS & Loyalty Benchmark report. We’re very proud of that score, yet even with such great reception by customers, there are areas to improve.
Snowflake Support is in the unique position of having rich, contextual information about areas of success and opportunities for improvement across Snowflake’s customer journey. But all of that information is useless if we don’t turn it into meaningful intelligence for Product Management and Engineering. Support must create a system that objectively and consistently reveals the true customer experience with our products and services. That’s what enables Support to be a true customer advocate.
How We’re Listening to and Learning from Our Customers
Snowflake Support has set up ongoing signals to ensure that we are actively listening to customer input and then responding to that feedback. The goal is to prioritize improvements behind the scenes so that when you need us, your experience partnering with Snowflake Support just works.
Here are the key signals we’re listening to and learning from:
- Customer Satisfaction Surveys and Closed-Loop Process: When a Support case closes, the customer has an opportunity to rate their experience in a brief survey and give us feedback about what went well and what can be improved. We take this feedback and drive the execution of improvements via a closed-loop process that scales and measures customer impact. We also follow up with certain customers to gather more details about their experience and create a data-driven plan for Support improvement.
- Support Case Reviews: We select specific Support cases for review once they are closed, and in the past year we’ve reviewed nearly 12.5% of cases. Case reviews examine the Cloud Support Engineer (CSE)’s case management, customer service, and troubleshooting skills. Technical Support Managers provide CSEs with individual coaching based on the case review and identify opportunities for broader training and process improvement.
- Annual Customer Experience Relational Survey: To find out if our efforts are meeting customers’ needs, Snowflake conducts a yearly Customer Experience Relational Survey. This year, we surveyed more than 3,000 customers in over 50 countries on their experience with Snowflake across every touchpoint. As mentioned above, we received an outstanding NPS score of 68. Results show that a large majority of customers were pleased with the entire end-to-end customer journey, including their experience requesting help and getting support from Snowflake.
How We’re Acting to Create a Better Customer Experience
Based on customer feedback, here are the areas where we’ve improved:
- Customer Service Excellence: We’ve been focusing on improving the quality of our customer interactions and communications. This includes clearly communicating what customers can expect from our products and services, building our customer service skills, and empathizing with customers when they have an issue. This effort has led to a 13.6% improvement in customer service skill ratings over the past year, based on case reviews.
- Quick Issue Clarification: We’ve been working to understand the specific nature of each customer’s issue as early as possible in the case, before performing diagnostics and targeting a solution. This troubleshooting best practice has led to a 10.7% year-over-year improvement in issue clarification case review ratings.
Here are the areas in which we’re driving improvement now:
- Support Portal and Systems: We’re focusing on ways to simplify and streamline access to Support when help is needed with the launch of Support within Snowflake. Now in public preview, this new feature provides direct customer access to managing a Snowflake Support case via the new Snowsight UI. During the public preview phase, most customers have the ability to enable Support within Snowflake. Your account administrator can file a case and request account enablement today.
- Response and Resolution Time: We’re focusing on concrete ways to improve the time it takes for us to respond to and resolve issues. These include:
- Support Diagnostics: We’re creating advanced diagnostic tools to ensure our CSEs have the right information at the right time to resolve customer issues faster. Snowflake has a wealth of diagnostic information that can aid in troubleshooting, so we are designing capabilities that can discover relevant diagnostic insights more quickly.
- Support Intelligence: Our CSEs are optimizing a unified search tool that gives them the right resources they need to quickly find a resolution to the issue, instead of having to spend time looking for the knowledge in multiple systems or knowledge bases.
- Support Analytics: When a case is created, we’re using a machine learning algorithm that analyzes the case comments and assigns sentiment and attention scores based on multiple factors. This flags cases for immediate attention and allows us to respond to them faster.
- Support-Engineering Collaboration: Being part of the same Product organization helps to fast-track cases that require Engineering attention, and we’re working to forge even stronger links and two-way communication to minimize silos and build proactive partnerships. The best support case is the one that isn’t necessary, so if we identify a cluster of similar customer cases, we work closely with Engineering to resolve the underlying issue.
Our goal across the Snowflake Support team is to provide best-in-class service and support to all of our customers. Be sure to enable Support within Snowflake now so that you can contact us more easily and directly for help. And, if you’ve provided us with feedback this year, THANK YOU! We hope you’ll continue to tell us how we’re meeting or exceeding your expectations, as well as where we need to improve. We are listening.