service marketing The Accellion Service Guarantee
Accellion was a young high-tech firm with leading-edgetechnology in the distributed file storage, management and deliverymarket space. Still new to the industry, the firm aimed to becomethe global backbone for the next generation of Internet-basedapplications. Its main value proposition to the world’s largestenterprises, as well as to Internet-based providers of premiumcontent, was to allow them to serve their users faster, increaseoperational efficiencies and lower total costs. Specifically,Accellion customers could improve the access time for downloadingand uploading files by more than 200%. This performance improvementwas achieved by locating an intelligent storage and file managementsystem at the “edges of the Internet” and thereby deliveringcontent from regions located closer to the end user. The typicaltime-consuming routing through many servers and hubs could beavoided using Accellion’s infrastructure. The need for an Internetinfrastructure to deliver high bandwidth content to end-users hadnever been greater. There was a trend towards multimedia andpersonalized Web content, all of which could not be deliveredefficiently by existing infrastructure, which routed data throughthe congested network of servers that form the backbone of theInternet. This prompted Accellion to develop and launch a newservice: distributed file storage, management and delivery.Accellion provided an applications platform that resided onindependent servers, which were directly connected to the users’Internet Service Providers (ISPs), thereby avoided the congested“centres” of the Internet. This decreased access time and allowedAccellion to distribute specialized content and applications moreefficiently. To market Accellion’s value proposition, the CEO,Warren J. Kaplan and the firm’s chief strategist, S. Mohan, feltthat key success factors for Accellion’s aggressive growth strategywere its leading-edge technology, excellence in service deliveryand high customer satisfaction. They envisioned that customerswould prefer to leverage Accellion’s technology and partnershipsinstead of managing the details of deploying, maintaining andupgrading their own storage infrastructure for distributed Internetapplications. To build a customer-driven culture and crediblycommunicate service excellence to the market, Accellion aimed toharness the power of service guarantees. Cost effective servicesfor improving performance and reliability were becoming critical,as the widespread use of multimedia and other large files increasedexponentially. The value proposition was clearly attractive, buthow could Accellion convince prospective clients that itstechnology and service actually could deliver what they promised?Mohan felt that Quality of Service (QoS) Guarantee would be apowerful tool to make its promises credible and at the same timepush his team to deliver what had been promised. Mark Ranford,Accellion’s Director for Product Management and Mohan spearheadedthe development of the QoS Guarantee. They finally launched the QoSGuarantee stating that “it is a revolutionary statement of ourcommitment to the customer to do whatever it takes to ensuresatisfaction.” Accellion’s Quality of Service Guarantee TheAccellion Quality of Service Guarantee defines Accellion’sassurance and commitment to providing the Customer with value-addedService and is incorporated into Accellion’s Customer Contact. Thedefinition of terms used herein is the same as those found in theCustomer Contact.
1. Performance Guarantee Accellion guarantees that theperformance of the Network in uploading and downloading content, asa result of using the Acellion Service, will be no less than 200%of that which is achieved by a benchmark origin site being accessedfrom the edges of the Internet. For all purposes herein,performance measurement tests will be conducted by Accellion.
2. Availability Guarantee Accellion guarantees 100% ServiceAvailability, excluding Force Majuere and Scheduled Maintenance forCustomers who have opted for our replication services.
3. Customer Service Guarantee Should Accellion fail to meet theservice levels set out in Section 1 and 2 above, Accellion willcredit the Customer’s account with one (1) month’s service fee formonth affected when the failure(s) occurred, provided the Customergives written notice to Accellion of such failure within five (5)days from the date such failure occurred. Accellion maintains a24-hour support center and will provide the Customer with aresponse to any inquiry in relation to the Service no more than 2hours from the time of receipt of such query by customerservice
Evaluate the Accellion’s guarantee. How effective will it be incommunicating service excellence to potential and currentcustomers?
Will the guarantee be successful in creating a culture forservice excellence within Accellion?
Do you think customers might take advantage of this guarantee?Why?
