Own Company Leverages PagerDuty To Transform Customer Service Operations

Headquartered in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Own Company is a leading SaaS data protection platform for some of the largest SaaS ecosystems in the world, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and ServiceNow. Through capabilities like data security, backup and recovery, archiving, and sandbox seeding, Own empowers thousands of organizations worldwide to manage and protect the mission-critical data that drives their business. The company is ranked #38 on the Financial Times’ list of America’s fastest growing companies in 2021 and is New Jersey’s first Enterprise SaaS Unicorn. 

More than 5,000 customers rely on Own to safeguard their data and help them comply with industry and government data regulations. The company is renowned for delivering exceptional customer support, having received a Salesforce Appy Award for its commitment to customer success. With four times as many five-star ratings as its closest competitor, Own is the number one data backup application on the Salesforce AppExchange.

Gadi Vered is the Vice President of Customer Support at Own and oversees three support centers in the US, UK and Israel. “I’m proud of the team for earning the trust of our customers,” Gadi explained. “Our customers rest assured that should they lose their data, they can quickly return to business as usual and avoid costly consequences such as a loss of productivity and revenue.”

Meeting SLAs in a Fast-Growing Company 

Since its founding in 2015, Own has experienced an incredible growth rate of more than 100% yearly. However, this rapidly expanding customer base—including larger contracts with enterprise customers—put Own’s customer service teams under increasing pressure to provide top-level, 24/7 support.

Before using PagerDuty, customer support staff worked evenings and weekends, and manually checked emails to ensure they met service level agreements (SLAs) as specified in their customer contracts. The team had to be ready to resolve issues at any moment, which affected their personal lives and resulted in sleepless nights, which we consciously chose to reverse.  

“We had to be on all the time and performing at 200% at any given moment,” said Gadi. “Our customers perform most of their activity overnight or on weekends and need a guarantee that we will be there to cover them on their demanding SLAs.” 

Leveraging PagerDuty to Transform Customer Service Operations

PagerDuty provided Gadi’s department the comprehensive functionality to transform their Customer Support response process. “There are common tools between the customers and our team; with PagerDuty, we’re able to utilize them effectively to drive value,” said Vered. Own can trigger PagerDuty through Email, Salesforce, and Slack, giving the customer support team more control and flexibility over notifications. 

For instance, PagerDuty triggers midway through the expiration of an open case to ensure that the team meets the SLA with plenty of time to spare. In addition, the team can add PagerDuty triggers on Slack, so they can provide additional support to customers and demonstrate Own’s commitment to 24/7 rapid response. The team also has robust escalation policies up to the CEO, Sam Gutmann, so alerts are never missed. Teams can now respond in minutes, well below their one-hour response SLA. “With PagerDuty, our customers are assured that we’re committed to short responses in a support policy and that they will be upheld,” said Vered. “With the right people, technology, and processes in place, the sky is the limit.”   

With PagerDuty, Own can provide 24/7 customer support operations worldwide with flexible scheduling and easy updates during a last-minute change in the on-call rotation. The scheduling and reporting features also enable managers to track off-hours work by their on-call teams and provide overtime compensation, resulting in stronger staff motivation and dedication to customer success. “We leverage PagerDuty to provide exceptional customer support,” said Vered. “We use reporting for pay, as well as keeping ourselves honest on how we do, as trust through transparency is a core value for our company.”

Effectively Troubleshooting Data Loss

PagerDuty has been instrumental in helping Own quickly restore large-scale, critical data for its customers. When a large banking customer deployed a software update without fully testing it, a bug caused the system to delete a staggering loss of essential records. The banking customer submitted a high-priority case to Own over the weekend, which triggered a PagerDuty notification to the on-call engineer. Within eight minutes of the case opening, the Customer Support team connected with the customer and helped them quickly identify and restore the records, averting a considerable crisis.

Another customer had inadvertently changed sales opportunity records within Salesforce right before the end of the quarter. The customer frantically called Own’s support line, configured to trigger PagerDuty during off-hours. Within minutes, the customer service team was on Zoom with the customer and helped guide them through restoring the records.

“Perpetuating success needs constant nurturing, especially as you grow and land larger contracts. For us, this is where PagerDuty became the obvious choice to integrate with,” said Vered. 

Benefits of PagerDuty

By implementing PagerDuty, Own Company has transformed its customer service operations, with benefits including:

• A scalable solution that enables teams to meet SLAs with faster response times.
• Increased visibility with detailed reporting and incident response data.
• Higher motivation among customer support staff with proof-of-overtime compensation.
• Lower employee burnout and increased engagement with defined rotations and escalation policies.

“PagerDuty scales with us as we grow,” shared Vered. “PagerDuty allows us to maximize our team of experts who effectively solve issues for our customers.”

Using PagerDuty within Salesforce Service Cloud

Looking to the future, Vered’s team is eager to evaluate PagerDuty’s integration with Salesforce Service Cloud announced in 2021, determined to break down further walls between his team and the Engineering teams.

PagerDuty’s native work-where-you-are experience inside of Salesforce Service Cloud enables teams to view the PagerDuty status dashboard directly within Salesforce and provide the visibility needed to proactively engage with customers when issues arise. Customer service teams also have access to the PagerDuty incident command console within Salesforce, allowing them to seamlessly escalate urgent issues to the appropriate development teams natively within the app.

“This looks to be an absolute game changer,” said Vered. “I’m excited about PagerDuty’s future direction and the investment in the Salesforce integration.”

To learn how PagerDuty can help your team make things simple and transform operations in a digital-first world, contact your account manager or try a 14-day free trial today.