The numbers are impressive enough on their own. For the fifth year in a row, Citrix’s Support and Services organization earned the prestigious Global Rated Outstanding Assisted Support certification from the Technology & Services Industry Association (TSIA).

Only a handful of companies have been awarded this certification for five or more years.

According to TSIA, the “Rated Outstanding” certification “recognizes organizations that achieve the highest industry standards for customer support.” Adding to the significance of this honor, in 2020 TSIA included Citrix self-service support options along with assisted support.

While we’re proud of this “5 in 5” milestone, the journey is our true measure of success. It charts the thoughtful, end-to-end transformation of our portfolio, our mindset, and our vision of what world-class technical support can deliver to customers.

Reimagining Support

The TSIA certifications validate the success of our strategic plan to rethink traditional technical support services. Instead of a reactive “break-fix” approach, we adopted a proactive stance focused on maximizing uptime, minimizing risk, and optimizing performance and stability of each customer’s Citrix environment. The key is helping customers address potential issues as early as possible to prevent or minimize disruptions and instability.

We also realigned our services with the standards of the IT industry. Instead of keeping maintenance and support separate, we brought them together in a holistic solution that also includes training, installation, configuration, and monitoring.

As the foundation of this transformation, we introduced Customer Success Services (CSS). The goals for our new portfolio of support offerings include greater choice and control for customers.

  • Three levels of choice to match customer needs:
    • Select — Includes software updates and upgrades, expert guidance, proactive monitoring tools, and online training
    • Priority — Adds proactive support from a team led by an assigned technical account manager (TAM) and access to engineers via the Priority Queue
    • Priority Plus — Adds preventive care through elective packages that offer consulting services, managed services, workspace modernization, and global or dedicated escalation engineers and TAMs
  • Choice in how to connect and submit support requests, including chat, online and phone
  • Control through self-service offerings:
    • Success Center offering guidance, resources, and step-by-step instructions
    • Knowledge Center containing articles and bulletins written by Citrix technical experts
    • Proactive monitoring using tools, analytics, and cloud services

We’re continuing to innovate and improve self-service features and functionality to help our customers. For instance, we launched new product landing pages with a mix of curated and dynamic solutions and introduced technical chatbots that integrate with interactive live chat. Other innovations include generating dynamic content recommendations tailored to the customer’s stated issue.

Improving Customer Outcomes

The bottom line for all these changes is better customer outcomes — whether that means faster issue resolution, less downtime, better system performance, or a smoother support process. Customers depend on Citrix support to sustain the highest level of availability, security, and user productivity, especially in view of two major shifts: the move to the cloud and remote work due to the pandemic. We have seen plenty of evidence that our transformed offerings are resonating with customers.

Select Customers:

  • 91 percent of surveyed IT organizations find the CSS Select feature benefits better compared to other technology vendors.
  • 87 percent of surveyed Fortune 500, Global 500, and Large Enterprise IT organizations improved environment performance and downtime with their CSS Select subscription.

Priority Customers:

  • 91 percent of surveyed IT organizations improved issue acceleration, resolution and minimized downtime since upgrading to CSS Priority.
  • 82 percent of surveyed IT organizations improved success rate of change events since upgrading to CSS Priority.

Leading the Industry

Our TSIA certifications are among a list of notable awards, such as the NorthFace ScoreBoard Award for World Class Excellence in Customer Service for Support, which we have won for five successive years. These honors attest to Citrix leadership in support and services, but they also remind us to keep innovating and refining our programs on behalf of global customers.

“The success of any business is measured by the success of its customers and the results it can help them to achieve,” said Hector Lima, Executive Vice President, Customer Experience Services, Citrix. “In 2020, our customers faced some of the most challenging circumstances they’ve ever had to manage, and in response, we reimagined our customer support operations to enrich the resources and experiences we provide and drive positive outcomes for their business. We are pleased to be recognized by TSIA for our efforts and will continue to evolve and innovate our support and services offerings to position our customers for success.”

The TSIA Operational Best Practices (OBP) program is a rigorous certification process that rates the capabilities of customer support organizations across all aspects of their operations, including more than 196 best practices. Auditors conducted a thorough inspection of Citrix and its processes, reviewing important procedures and inspecting support outcomes and determined that the company’s assisted and self-service support processes exceeded industry benchmarks.