LAssociates
The Customer
LAssociates (LA) is a Los Angeles-based advertising agency and post-production facility that specializes in holistic brand building. They employee a highly diversified team of artists, illustrators, motion graphics designers, editors, and other professional creatives. They expertise brings a global perspective of audiences and spans all entertainment platforms and branding, such as theatrical, television, video games, stage, and music. In a few short years since their founding, they have become an industry leader and have garnered dozens of honors and award nominations.
LAssociates Pain Point
Over a weekend, LAssociates encountered a heat event that had unfortunately triggered a complete power-off across their facility. They had been in the process of archiving data as a step toward deploying a new OpenDrives system, and they were also under incredibly tight project deadlines. Needing to get everything back up and running, company personnel made a call to OpenDrives support and opened two tickets back to back. Their situation was urgent and moving toward critical. On top of that, they were extremely concerned that they had actually lost data in the event, which would have been catastrophic.
The Solution
Upon receiving word from LA, we initiated a call with them within 30 minutes. We quickly brought the system back online, cleared all faults, reconnected all clients, and restored them to a running condition. What was important in this troubleshooting and service restoration process was actually confirming the cause of the situation—a heat event—which we were quickly able to do. Once we were confident that their entire environment was up and running again, we kept a very close eye on them, proactively checking in several times during the following week before closing out the tickets as resolved.
Obstacles and Outcomes
The biggest obstacles in this issue with LA were the timeframe (it was early morning when they reported the issues) and their pressing deadlines, which meant that we needed to exert an extra effort to manage their expectations, keep them informed, and calm their fears of having lost data while we carried out troubleshooting procedures.
Very often, the problem is not that customers like LA have experienced an outage, because they know that things happen. Rather, the problem is centered on the lack of visibility they have into the diagnosis process and troubleshooting, as well as their inability to make further decisions or carry out actions until the troubleshooting and remediation is complete. It’s an uncomfortable feeling of being out of control, which no business wants to experience.
Having been there ourselves, we make sure that we empathize with their situation and their reactions. We work really hard to engage our customers and keep them informed throughout the entire process. When we do, the outcome is always favorable: all systems operational, and a grateful and satisfied customer.