Helping Elastic Customers Succeed | Elastic TAMs partner with organizations to maximize their investments

Elastic Consulting helps our customers drive impactful business outcomes. From preventing fraud in the financial space, to taking actions on botnets across eCommerce platforms. In this part of our series, Nikki Jones, Customer Success Lead, and Chad Pryor, Elastic Technical Account Manager (TAM), discuss the secret recipe for helping customers achieve success, and the value of the TAM/customer relationship.

How do Elastic Technical Account Managers support our customers?

We provide a personal connection, a bridge of success to enable our customers to derive the most value from their investment in our products and services. We are solution providers who proactively guide the technology landscape, help resolve challenges before they occur, and provide a gateway into the Elastic ecosystem so our customers can focus on the business outcomes most important to them.

We heard something about a secret recipe for success, care to share this with us?

My recipe is really quite simple: 1 cup customer success management, 1 cup architect, 1 cup product management, 1 cup project manager, 1 cup business development with a dash of customer advocacy. Bake into the voice of the customer.

Working together cross functionally on projects throughout the customer journey to plan the technology roadmap, validate configurations, prevent issues before they happen and implement successfully, means we have happy customers.

Tell us how you became an Elastic Consultant?

I had my first introduction to Elasticsearch version 0.9 & 1.0.1 at a previous company. I created a dashboard of multiple sources from the operations infrastructure to create a heat map of incidents per service based on MTTR and cost of engineers. This allowed us to view the outages, their cost and availability. During the early days of Elasticsearch we were an extremely heavy user of Kibana, with over 300 users.

Then I went to the first Elastic{ON} where I met the founders who were knowledgeable of the company I was working for and knew a little about my use case. I knew Elastic was a place I could throw my energy and creativity towards. It felt like a team and I loved the incredible nature of Search. So I submitted my resume and the rest is history.

In your words, what do you do for our customers?

I act as a conduit between our Elastic technical resources and our customers' to help achieve business outcomes and strategize on the technology roadmap. A real highlight for me is helping our customers see the full potential of using our solutions and how to solve many business challenges. Having regular meetings and asking the right questions to facilitate better outcomes really maximizes their Elastic investment.

What kind of business and technical challenges do you help our customers to solve?

Some of the challenges we love to help solve include upgrade planning, product and feature guidance, and support of new features and adoption strategies. Also the Identification of pain points and feedback to Product teams is really important, as are support case reviews and improvements.

What has been one the most interesting or coolest use cases you were involved in and why?

One customers’ team had been using Splunk to try and respond to bad bots across their e-commerce platform. The challenge for them was doing this in real time, so I worked with them to implement Watcher to take actions and identify the bad bots across multiple data streams and created an allow/deny list which enabled them to block bad bots in real time and in an automated way.

Another customer in the financial space was looking to correlate business transactions with operational analytics. I worked very closely to enable the teams, helping them to create a Business KPI dashboard that was shared across multiple business units and used by Executives for real insights. Later I found this was further extended into their security space.

This concept helped prevent fraud. Several of these team members went on to lead other Elastic Stack initiatives within their organization and were quickly promoted. They even spoke at one of our Elastic events. Go Team X!

How do you think our customers view you and your relationship?

I strive to be part of the team and become the center for all things Elastic. Knowing the challenges a customer faces while using our products is important for helping them be successful. Understanding many use cases within their industry helps provide guidance and strengthens the relationship. As new stakeholders become part of their team and the Elastic footprint evolves, I serve as a consistent point of contact helping provide a common language which enables us to Invest in their success and reach their goals.

How does it feel to help our customers succeed?

If you have ever assisted with a goal, closed a big deal, solved a nagging technical problem, mentored someone or helped someone grow into something more, you will know there is a sense of pride and accomplishment in that growth. That's how it feels to help our customers succeed.

Aligning with our customers' desired business outcomes to achieve success

"Our TAMs provide technical and strategic guidance at every stage in your Elastic journey. They are an extension of your team and dedicated to helping you achieve your business outcomes. Contact Elastic Consulting to learn more about Embedded Services and how we can help you maximize your Elastic investment."