How Park Place is Transforming Customer Service

Remote monitoring was a feature of support contracts in the past, but Park Place has taken it to a new level.

In the spirit of Customer Service Week, Oct. 1-5, Park Place Technologies appreciates every single one of our more than 13,000 clients around the globe and will continue to look for ways to celebrate and serve you.

When Park Place Technologies launched Park Place—our proprietary machine learning-based remote monitoring capability—we expected it to change our clients’ data center operations. The service represents a fundamental shift, from a reactive stance that waits for problems to occur to a truly predictive mode that gets out in front of emerging issues.

Over the past few months, we’ve integrated Park Place for hundreds of clients and weaved it throughout our customer service processes. Even though we were expecting a big impact, we’ve been astonished by how predictive maintenance is driving a positive evolution in our response model and service quality. Here are some examples of what we’ve been seeing.

A New Level of Monitoring

Remote monitoring was a feature of support contracts in the past, but Park Place has taken it to a new level. That’s resulting in direct cost- and time-savings. For example, one client, Cincinnati Bell, reports that they’re saving 8 hours per week in employee time, simply because they don’t have to travel to their many unstaffed, out-of-the-way locations to check on servers and other equipment. They can tell if everything is fine right from their mobile phones.

To turn that into dollars and cents, consider that the average administrator can support about 64 Windows O/S instances while being paid a salary that generally runs upwards of $120,000—or $160 per instance per month. Add Park Place and a single administrator can handle far more, resulting in cost-savings and helping organizations deal with that pesky talent gap.

Better Trouble Tickets Mean Better Service

It may sound like a small thing, but customers rave about the automated trouble tickets in Park Place. They’re automatically generated whenever the AI identifies a potential problem or an active failure, with no human intervention necessary. Park Place engineers receive the alert, along with all the information they need to initiate a solution, including machine type, serial number, and part number where the malfunction is showing up. Clients no longer need to look around for contracts, telephone numbers, and equipment details just to start the response process, and there’s no escalation procedure, either. What’s more, engineers can now hit the ground running with more information.

We’re thrilled that Park Place is helping us improve on our first-time fix rate, which was already head and shoulders above the OEMs. We say it’s all about uptime, and Park Place is helping us deliver.

New Discussions Drive New Value

One of the greatest advantages of Park Place is the increased visibility. The client and Park Place engineers have access to a wealth of information about hardware status, events, and inventories. This is helpful in day-to-day operations, as well as long-term planning. We’re finding that clients are more aware of what’s in their data centers and what’s happening with that equipment. The information is opening up new conversations about lifecycle expectancy, strategic upgrade options, and other topics. Park Place also empowers engineers to help with more than just break/fix by optimizing performance, providing configuration suggestions, and so on.

Park Place encapsulates our commitment to the highest quality customer service, leveraging innovation to make a difference for our clients. From roomier budgets to less stressed systems admins to better asset planning and performance, Park Place is beating our expectations and those of many client organizations. If you’re not on board yet, we’d love to talk to you about securely integrating Park Place so you can get the full customer service value from your support arrangement.