Sergio Ravera talks about key Artera’s moments of Q32018

Milan, 22 November 2018. Privacy issues in the modern online world is nothing to be surprised about, and in fact, many companies are concerned about the storage of their data. This is one of the focuses that Swiss managed hosting provider Artera specializes in.

In this interview, Sergio Ravera, the CEO of Artera, discussed recent events that took place within the company. He also shared some of the details about plans of Artera for the upcoming 2019 year.

Can you please tell me about the performance of Artera during the last three months? Which projects were imitated or some new products introduced?

Sergio Ravera: “The primary focus of the third quarter for Artera was to improve communications with our customers. We defined which methods of communication are more preferable for our customers. We also restarted the process of sending regular newsletters to our clients. They now receive information about our company and some important events that take place within Artera.

We also improved the new communication channel in a bid to provide advice to our customers for emergency work. For instance, we now make sure to inform our customers in case we need to restart our server 15 days in advance.

During the last three months, we also worked a lot on the development of our website. We changed a lot of pages and included new information about our internal technology and processes.

Overall, the third quarter for Artera was very satisfying. We increased the number of leads by 80%, when compared to the previous quarter and achieved all sales targets. Our team is reporting the increase in sales to new customers and to already acquired customers. Our “marketing machine” started working more efficiently, and this provided us with immediate positive results.

During these months, we have not launched any new products, but we have exciting news for 2019. We studied a bunch of requests from our customers. Now, we understand their needs better, and we can design new products that will satisfy all their requirements.”

During our previous talk, you said that Artera was planning to concentrate on improving its communications with their clients. Did the company make some steps in this direction?

Sergio Ravera: “As I mentioned before, the third quarter of 2018 was about advancing communication with our customers. We significantly improved the content on our website. To be more specific, we offered more clarity in regards to the detailed presentation of our products. We also improved on how we describe our production processes.

We also explained that Artera is a managed hosting provider and what is a managed hosting provider, in general.

In this context, we also highlighted how Artera is different from other companies in the field. Speaking of this, I’d like to add that we adopt unique technologies and processes, and I believe that there is no such company on the market. Another significant thing is that when clients use Artera’s services, they know the precise location of their stored data. Our competitors do not provide such information to their clients.

In addition to that, we put a lot of efforts into our blog and overall content on the website. This is an ongoing project, and we are still working on it.”

I recall that Artera planned to improve regarding user experience earlier this year. How did the company perform in this sense?  

Sergio Ravera: “Yes, that is correct. In line with the improvement of communication processes with our clients, we are working on the optimization of our website for the clients. As a result of our continuous efforts, we have enhanced the renewal rate of services by 90% and achieved a very high customer satisfaction rating of 4.8 / 5.0. I believe this also can help us to increase sales to the existing and potential clients.

At the moment, our programmers are working on the reserved area of our site.

One of the most fundamental things that happened during the quarter number three is that we clearly defined our target audience. We ultimately moved away from providing services as a B2C company, and now we are only functioning as a B2B provider.

I am happy with this change since our message to the market is much more focused right now. Currently, Artera moved to specialization on web agencies’ needs.”

What about the upcoming three months of 2018? Does Artera have something special planned for the Q4?

Sergio Ravera: “We want to continue improving our communications with existing and potential customers. To attract new clients, we are planning to produce more technical and original content on our website, just as we do right now. This content will be mostly aimed at web agencies.

The primary objective will be to improve the acquisition of leads through the production of content, from our website and other digital channels.

As of now, there is a gap between Artera and the end customer, so we believe that web agencies are perfect intermediaries to fill in this role.

In the upcoming months, we also plan to modify the information that we provide for our reseller. This includes the terms and conditions of the contract and other important info that is crucial for our reseller in Italy.”

Please tell me about Artera’s plans for 2019? Any big projects planned for the upcoming year?

Sergio Ravera: “The upcoming year will be a year of innovation for Artera. We are planning to introduce the new service that will be added to our current service package. Presently, we have three different hosting packages, and we plan to expand this set to six packages. This will be the same type of hosting, but with the different amount of resources. It will also be priced differently.

Then, we will also have an entirely new product for managing corporate email in the cloud. We got this idea from our customers - a lot of our clients asked for an email service with a backup and other security features. For them, it is essential to know that their data is stored in Switzerland or Italy.

Another update will be live in 2019 – we are planning to launch two new cloud services: file hosting and CRM. Focus here is not different from our other products – we will guarantee the best quality and performance possible.

File hosting service will be somewhat similar to the famous services like – Dropbox or Google Drive. But our message is a little bit different since this file hosting service will provide our clients with the opportunity to keep their privacy. The other service is tailored for CRM purposes. It will enable our clients to store the information about their customers on a private cloud in the most secure way possible. This is a crucial step forward because we will use our cloud service as the base for these services.

In 2019, we plan to finish up the improvement of the processes that we started at the beginning of this year. We talk faster and more efficient support, a personalized path for the activation of customized service and complete automation of administrative processes.

As a director of Artera, I am excited to work with my fantastic team with this new set-up.”