Virtela Named Stevie Awards Finalist For Customer Service Of The Year

DENVER, Feb. 8, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Virtela, the world's largest independent managed network, security and cloud services company, today announced it has been named a finalist for "Customer Service Department of the Year" in the 7th annual Stevie Awards for Sales and Customer Service. This is the fourth consecutive year that Virtela has been recognized for this award, illustrating the company's commitment to achieving highest customer satisfaction by delivering personalized and proactive support. More than 1,100 entries from organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were submitted to this year's competition. 

Virtela has made customer experience its number one priority from day one, maintaining an advanced support model that consistently challenges industry standards. In 2012, Virtela's Global Operations Centers improved the speed to answer customer calls by nearly 50 percent, answering first calls within an average of 6.4 seconds, down from 12 seconds in 2011. This is compared to industry norms of hours (or even days for a callback). Virtela maintained its impressive rate of opening 99 percent of trouble tickets proactively and resolving 95 percent of issues on the first call. The company continued to outperform its aggressive 4-hour global guarantee for mean time to restore (MTTR), by an average of 53.4 minutes, a 40 percent improvement over 2011.

Underscoring the company's passion for support, 97 percent of customer survey respondents in 2012 said they were highly satisfied or satisfied with the courtesy of the Virtela technical operations staff, and 95 percent were highly satisfied or satisfied with Virtela's resolution of their issues.

"We are thrilled to be recognized yet again by The Stevies for our success in providing customers with world-class support that not only meets but exceeds their highest expectations," said Ted Studwell, Virtela's senior vice president of engineering and operations. "The dedication of our global support team has been pivotal to the continued success of Virtela and we're committed to ongoing development of programs, tools and systems that deliver the industry's highest service levels and most meaningful service guarantees."

One of Virtela's key differentiators from traditional network providers is the company's personalized and proactive approach to customer support. Virtela's Global Operation Centers (GOCs) are staffed 24x7 by network engineering and IT experts who proactively monitor, inspect, detect and analyze customer networks and IT infrastructure using proprietary technology -VirtelaPredict - to diagnose 95% of potential enterprise network issues before they impact network health. Virtela offers a broad suite of IT infrastructure management services that enable CIOs and IT teams to better achieve their strategic priorities by offloading the time intensive but critical end-to-end management of key network, security and other IT infrastructure devices to Virtela and its innovative management systems and portal, VirtelaView.

Vote Now: People's Choice Stevie Award for Favorite Customer Service
As a finalist, Virtela has been entered in the People's Choice Stevie Award for Favorite Customer Service. Voting is open until February 10, 2013. Click here to vote for Virtela in the "Favorite Customer Service - Telecommunications" category.

Stevie Award winners will be announced during a gala banquet on Monday, February 25, 2013 at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. More details are available at www.stevieawards.com/sales.

Recognition from The Stevies further expands a growing list of industry awards Virtela has received over the past year for its innovative services and superior customer support. These include the Frost & Sullivan Product Leadership Award, World Communication Award, Global Telecoms Business Innovation Award, InfoSecurity Global Excellence Award, Best in Biz Award, Mobility Tech Zone Award, and the AlwaysOn Global 250.

About Virtela

Virtela Technology Services Incorporated is the smart alternative to traditional global carriers and equipment vendors for enterprise networking and virtualized IT services. The company delivers award-winning services via its Virtualized Overlay Network and Virtela Enterprise Services Cloud (ESC) platform, which enables the transition of branch office networking and security services to the cloud. Virtela gives enterprises the benefit of "asset-light" software-defined networking that delivers 80% cost savings in upfront capital and 30% savings in ongoing operating expenses.

Recognized by more than 50 awards for outstanding service innovation and customer support in the last two years, Virtela's services suite includes proactively managed networks, security, application acceleration, IT infrastructure and mobile device management.

Virtela is headquartered in Denver, Colorado, with global support centers around the world. For more information, please call +1 (720) 475-4000 or visit www.virtela.net.

SOURCE Virtela Technology Services Incorporated