Deliver differentiated customer experiences: Optimize data management with NetApp
Mara McMahon
Business outcomes are the single most important result that you as a service provider must deliver for your customers. Business outcomes result when data is everything that it can be—and nothing that it doesn’t need to be. Service providers who can’t keep up with rising demands will find that their customers look elsewhere. Harsh maybe, but true.
So, how do you deliver on these customer expectations? It starts with identifying what your customer needs. Then you design your services with a comprehensive architecture of systems, software, and other services that unite and manage the customer’s data as a single, connected experience.
Becoming a data management specialist
Your customers’ data can be anywhere and everywhere, in every form imaginable. And it’s growing by the minute, stored in public clouds, private clouds, and on premises. Your customers depend on it to survive and to thrive. Now you can design the data fabric that your customers need and deliver their data where, when, and how they need it.As a service provider, you might see your customers struggling to track their data, to manage it, and to extract real value from it. To overcome these challenges effectively, you need to restore order by ensuring that their data is in the right place, at the right time, for the right cost. At a minimum, you must deliver this level of service and customer experience (CX) without adding complexity into your workflows. The goal, however, is to reduce complexity and cost.
At NetApp, we work with you to simplify your architecture by helping you build a data fabric. The NetApp® software-centric architecture eliminates siloed data management, giving you the framework that you need to link your customer data from edge to core to cloud. You also get a standardized way to manage customer data—no matter where it’s stored.
By delivering agility that’s built on a data fabric, you optimize your customers’ performance. Customers can instantly adapt to evolving market demands, and they can continually evolve their own business in a world that’s consistently defined by new expectations.
A little extra help is close at hand
NetApp is committed to your success as a service provider. We offer the Fueled by NetApp Service Provider Program to support you in your go-to-market strategy, planning, and execution. Managed and delivered by experienced industry leaders, this program harnesses service provider–centric market insights and trends analysis to help you strategically understand how to:Monetize your assets like never before.
- Win more customer applications.
- Streamline your operations.
- Increase customer satisfaction.
Mastering the art of seamless experiences
Delivering the type of seamless data access services that a data fabric offers can have a huge positive impact on your business. Harvard Business Review studied the effects on subscription- and transaction-based services, and here's what they found:- Subscription-based. Customers who reported having the best past experiences have a 74% chance of remaining a subscribing member for at least another year. In fact, customers who gave the highest CX scores are likely to continue their subscription for another 6 years. But customers who rank their experiences as among the worst have only a 43% chance of being a member 1 year later.
- Transaction-based. After accounting for other factors, the study found that customers with the best past transaction-based experiences spend 140% more than customers who had the poorest past experiences.1
To achieve that trust, meeting customer expectations is key. However, you also need to understand those expectations in the context of today, how they’ll change over time, and how the market is constantly driving up demand.
For example, customers have become used to the high-quality experience that cloud so beautifully offers—the flexibility, the instant scalability. Yet most service providers haven’t quite managed to harness the opportunity of directing customer data among and between the various cloud options.
So, what can we do about that?
NetApp offers proven capabilities to optimally build and manage your customer data fabric. You can deliver a unified data experience across the world’s biggest clouds, private clouds, and on-premises environments so that your customers’ data is always on, available, and easily consumed.
With analysis and optimization tools from NetApp, your service can help make your customers’ costs more predictable across public, private, and hybrid clouds. By offering this predictability, you become an integral partner for delivering meaningful business outcomes to your customers, increasing their satisfaction, and reducing dreaded churn.
The icing on the cake? You have a greater opportunity to increase your profit margins.
How we have helped other service providers
Saudi Telecom Company (STC) is a real-world example of a service provider who uses NetApp technology to deliver business outcomes. STC serves more than 100 million customers. When searching for data storage to power its OpenStack cloud, STC wanted high flexibility to deliver new services and wanted cost efficiency to support competitive end-user pricing. So the company chose to use NetApp’s industry-leading integration with OpenStack.Partnering with NetApp has long-term value for STC. A NetApp powered data fabric unifies data mobility with seamless data management, so STC can handle data easily across data centers. And STC customers can interoperate with other clouds, giving them more choice and maximum application availability and avoiding vendor lock-in.
As a NetApp customer, STC can:
- Provide a cost-effective scale-up and scale-out solution.
- Earn high customer satisfaction for platform reliability, scalability, and security.
- Increase cloud choice and business agility for its customers through STC Marketplace.
- Successfully meet its market leadership objective.
What's your next step?
Find out how NetApp solutions help deliver business outcomes. For the full lowdown on how we can help you become a data management expert to enhance the customer experience, read our e-book Serving up success.1 There Is a Correlation between CX and Revenue Growth—and Here’s the Data to Back It Up
Mara McMahon
Mara McMahon is the Head of Partner and Service Provider Go-to-Market at NetApp delivered through the Fueled by NetApp program. She is a service provider expert in GTM activities with a maniacal focus on maximizing return on investment from infrastructure assets. Mara serves as a business consultant to partners and service providers across the globe through the Fueled by NetApp program which is a free service designed to ensure the desired business outcomes resulting from NetApp technology purchase are achieved. Mara has been working at NetApp (formerly SolidFire) for over five years and prior to SolidFire/NetApp, spent a number of years in product marketing and product management at a variety of service providers around the world including Cable & Wireless, SAVVIS, Verizon and Tata Communications. She has over 20 years’ experience working in executive, Product Management and Product Marketing roles. Mara has a BS from Wittenberg University and an MBA in marketing from The Kogod School of Business, American University. Mara looks forward to working with you in maximizing your ROI.
