By: Sean Devereaux
In my first blog, Chasing the Ever Changing Customer Expectation, we discussed the shift in customer expectations and as a leading technology service organization what our plans were to adapt. How do we reinvent our Service delivery to improve our customer’s experience and address their expectation of real-time service? Well, we started by breaking down, and ultimately restructuring, our Service department into smaller, more focused workgroups.
The first step was the creation of our Technical Service Desk. This dedicated team can better support our customers by providing convenient and less expensive solutions to issues. The second phase was a complete restructure of our Customer Service Center. Before, our Customer Care Representatives were tasked with multiple responsibilities from serving as switchboard operators for the entire Company to dispatching service technicians, to receiving customer calls for service issues, capturing the details and entering the service request.
This model of Customer Service may have served our customer’s well in the past, but it became clear from our customer surveys that it was not meeting their new expectations of service in real-time. To better understand the gaps in our processes which were impacting our customer’s experience, we surveyed a percentage of those with good service experiences and those with not-so-good experiences. The results gave us several key areas where a change could significantly improve our customer’s experience and ultimately led to the reinvention of our Service Department to the Customer Experience Center.
The Customer Experience Center was officially launched on March 1, 2016, and is a combination of our Technical Service Desk, Customer Service Center and Service Operations. The new model delivers one centralized team that is capable of supporting the Customer Experience for all offices.
Now, let’s briefly review the new structure. An auto attendant now greets all calls coming into the Company with two options; press 1 for a service issue or stay on the line for anything else. I know, an auto attendant doesn’t sound like an improvement to the Customer Experience, but in our case, this drastically cuts down on the number of times customers are transferred.
Customers who press 1 for a service issue are immediately greeted by a Technical Service Representatives ready to help resolve the issue remotely, if possible, which is a much different experience from speaking to someone less technical. If the Technical Service Desk can’t resolve the issue remotely, they make sure the appropriate notes, parts, etc. are on the service ticket leading to a quicker resolution from our service technicians in the field, reducing costs and system downtime for our customers.
Service calls ready for dispatch are now managed by a dedicated Service Dispatch team. Their sole focus is determining the priority level and getting the best technical resource scheduled to the customer site as quickly as possible.
If the customer has other questions or issues, they’ll be asked to stay on the line, and a Customer Advocate will assist in routing their calls, retrieving any documents they may need and answer any general questions. The Customer Advocate position was designed to help our customers easily navigate the ins and outs of Tech Electronics.
The next phase in the Customer Experience is to implement our proactive system monitoring solution for our Technical Service Desk. By monitoring our customer’s systems, we can better diagnose and even predict potential service issues or outages. This next phase will be fully implemented by the summer of 2016 as part of our suite of managed services.
We can’t stress it enough; real-time service is the new expectation across the board. The reinvention of our service department into centralized, dedicated and attentive workgroups was not only to provide our customers with better service, reduce transfers, improve service response times, increase first call completion and reduce costs but also to give our customers an overall enjoyable experience when dealing with Tech Electronics. Customers don’t always remember what issue was fixed and when, but they do remember their experience. If we can make each customer experience enjoyable and seamless, then we have done our job. As we have always said – we improve from the customer in not Tech out.
