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Surgient Case Study: Offshore Testing Reduces Costs for Surgient
Situation
Surgient, the market leader in self-service virtualization automation and lab management, experienced steady growth over the last few years, until recently, when the company experienced a dramatic increase in European based deployments. With a growing number of customers worldwide came the need for increasing the number of people in all areas of the company, including support.
Problem
Surgient's support team was based in the US, yet they were responsible for both US and European based customer support. To address overseas calls, current support team members were required to take turns weekly being on call overnight. As the call volume increased, the expanding need for overnight shifts became an ongoing challenge requiring additional bandwidth. "To address this growth, we began to explore additional avenues for expansion," shares Brian Wilson, Vice President of Services for Surgient.
Decision
After deciding to augment the support team, Surgient interviewed several offshore support services providers and selected TESTCo to provide outsourced support for their European customers. "We needed more than an answering service, we truly wanted people who work the same hours as Europeans and who have the technical depth to answer tier 2 and tier 3 support issues," says Wilson.
During the selection process, Surgient evaluated outsourcing options in Eastern Europe, South America and India. The evaluation process was extensive and included interviews with the software testing company and live calls with the potential teams in each country.
"Finding the right team is critical and it goes beyond just evaluating their technical knowledge," shares Wilson, "When outsourcing you must consider cultural and language barriers. We selected TESTCo's Ukraine team since they were technically savvy, culturally committed to staying with their company and the Ukrainian accent is more easily understood than others we interviewed."
Solution
To ensure continuity of service and coverage during holidays or staff members' time-off, Surgient wanted two staff members on the European Support Services team. "We needed one person to handle support full time, while the second was to augment support and fill a need on our user interface team," shares Wilson.
TESTCO provided a Support Engineer with the technical resources and training necessary to handle tier 2 support during European business hours. The second person, a UI Developer who is also trained in support, works side by side with the Support Engineer as needed and spends the balance of time working with Surgient's Customer Development Group on the branding of customer websites to each customer.
Both professionals are based in Kiev and have all the infrastructure necessary to be productive. They are connected to Surgient via VPN, and the Support Engineer has a US phone number for receiving customer calls, as well as a Surgient email account. Both are truly members of the Surgient team and work directly with US support and services teams.
"TESTCo delivered two great people. One person drives support and the second is strong on both the UI and support sides. This added benefit means they can help complete UI work overnight, enabling our services team to more rapidly deliver results," notes Wilson.
Benefits
The results are tremendous. Comments Wilson, "Previously, we designated a particular class of support tickets to be handled just during off hours. Often we experience a daily backlog, however, today seldom do we see even 1 or 2 still in the queue - which is a significant improvement."
Overall, the response times for all European based support issues have gone from 24-36 hours to now being handled the same business day, often in less than 2 hours, greatly surpassing Surgient's Service Level Agreements.
"I've been very happy with TESTCo. Their software testing services team members are sharp, technically savvy and committed to Surgient's success, which are qualities we required," shares Wilson. "In addition, they've helped us drive costs down, I'm spending half as much per person as I would using a domestic resource, further allowing us to deliver the highest level of service to our customers."
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About TESTCo
TESTCo customers eliminate software testing problems, slash support costs by up to 50% and achieve their release date commitments ... all without the risk of hunting down the best offshore testing vendor, the pain and frustration of learning how to properly manage them and the unpredictable results so common with most offshore software testing vendors.
About Surgient
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, Surgient is the market leader in self-service virtualization automation and lab management. The company's flagship, award-winning product, the Surgient Virtual Automation PlatformTM, optimizes IT's ability to support critical business initiatives, effectively manage diverse virtual resources and eliminate physical server and VM Sprawl. Using the Surgient Virtual Automation PlatformTM, world-class companies including IBM, Merck, Raymond James, HP, Halliburton, EMC, CA, Iron Mountain, Target, GE, SAP, Microsoft, Siemens and Intuit are accelerating their growth and profitability by automating virtual infrastructure in support of their business initiatives. Learn more at www.surgient.com.
TESTCo provides Offshore Testing, Offshore Software Testing, Software Testing Company and Software Testing Services.
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