Pantheon Partners With PagerDuty to Meet Customer Support SLAs

Pantheon is a WebOps (Website Operations) platform that provides the most complete and creativity-enabling platform for professional website creation. Over 300,000 websites and thousands of marketing and development teams trust Pantheon to provide a first-class experience and deliver positive business results. For example, Pantheon’s customer Patch.com constantly pushes out new content and has 50 million pageviews a month with 99.969% uptime—all through Pantheon’s platform.

Sarah German, a Support Manager at Pantheon, leads a team of support agents to help ensure that Pantheon’s clients are guaranteed service around the clock. To help meet SLAs, Pantheon uses PagerDuty to ensure customer support tickets are resolved in a timely manner. “We pride ourselves in continually progressing our support function to provide the best support possible to our customers,” explained German.

In Need of an On-Call Platform

Before Pantheon adopted PagerDuty, emergency support tickets were received and triaged in the same manner as non-urgent tickets. The Support team did not have a mechanism to automate escalation and guarantee a response time within the SLA.

Without a clear incident management platform or process, Pantheon Support experienced challenges, including:

• Difficulty providing 24/7 customer support
• Problems escalating an alert during weekends or after hours
• Trouble distinguishing and prioritizing between major and minor incidents within the Customer Support organization
• Meeting resolution time SLAs for customers

“We were a small team supporting our customers 24/7. We needed a way to automatically escalate incidents to ensure we never missed an alert,” said German.

Incident Management for Customer Support

The customer support organization turned to PagerDuty to fix their on-call and support escalation issues. Now, each member of the team—including managers and directors— is categorized into specific on-call severity levels:

• Level 0: Basic, non-technical customer support dispatch
• Level 1: Customer Support Agent
• Level 2: Customer Support Manager
• Level 3: Director of Customer Support

Incidents are escalated through this severity model until the issue is resolved. This process allows the customer support team to meet their SLAs surrounding support for customers. “We have SLAs around response time that are really important to uphold. PagerDuty gives our team that extra level of accountability,” explained German.

PagerDuty also helped Pantheon build an automated customer support ticketing process using PagerDuty’s ecosystem of over 500 integrations. Customers can call a support line—set up by Pantheon—that uses PagerDuty to open up a Zendesk ticket with information pertaining to the issue. Then, Pagerduty sends that information directly into a dedicated Slack channel so the right team member can acknowledge the issue within minutes.

Pantheon’s top levels of customers using Diamond or Platinum Support—their highest tiers of customer support—have access to a button in their Pantheon platform that was made available with the implementation of PagerDuty. Premium Support customers are guaranteed a 15-minute-or-less response time from a Pantheon customer support agent and major incidents are typically acknowledged within two minutes. Essentially, if a customer’s site goes down, they can jump into the Pantheon platform and click this button as an emergency alert to Pantheon support. PagerDuty then automatically notifies a technical engineer, who can acknowledge and begin working on the incident within minutes.

“With the confidence that PagerDuty provides, our customers and leadership team can trust in our promise to take action on incidents immediately,” explained German.

Pantheon has seen several improvements with PagerDuty, including:

• Meeting and exceeding SLAs for MTTA
• The ability to distinguish emergencies from regular support issues and automatically escalate incidents to quickly resolve incidents
• Increased reliability around providing 24/7 support to all customers with an end-to-end incident management platform
• Visibility into platform-level issues and digital operations health

“With PagerDuty, everything happens faster. When an incident comes in, it is immediately acknowledged and assigned to a support agent and can be escalated properly, if necessary,” explained German.

A Data-Driven Future for Customer Support

Looking ahead, Pantheon’s customer support organization is looking to expand its use of PagerDuty with data-driven solutions like PagerDuty Event Intelligence and Analytics. With these add-ons, German’s team can bring more value to Pantheon customers, including better understanding of the types of incidents that are occurring and actively reducing noise with the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning. Pantheon’s Engineering teams are also using PagerDuty and plan to look into how they can leverage these solutions to improve their digital operations.

To learn more about how PagerDuty can help your business with providing a streamlined customer support process, try PagerDuty today.