Upping our game with customer service
Overview
We wanted to find a way to give our customers better service,
and to make our customer service processes more consistent and
efficient.
Our customers are (predominantly London-based) professional
services businesses employing up to 200 people. For some of
our customers, it doesn't make financial sense for them to hire
their own IT manager, and for others they prefer to focus their
energy on their core competences - legal counsel, health provision,
retailing and so on.
In either case they want to outsource the running of their IT to
a specialist business. They are typically owner-managed businesses
demanding high-level and strategic account management.
The challenge
Many months ago, we realised that our customers weren't getting
the best possible service from us. The same problems were
recurring, causing unnecessary downtime (and expense to us) - and
we weren't doing anything systematic or rigorous to prevent
them.
We were also failing to make customers' systems really meet
their needs - we were guessing what their employees and businesses
needed, instead of questioning and listening to them. We knew
we ought to be doing these things, and had gone through the motions
of doing them, but they were ad hoc, occasional, unsystematic
approaches.
The solution
We needed to make our customer interactions more systematic,
effective and measurable. We adapted ideas from the large corporate
world, the UK Government's ITIL best practice guides and especially
our employees. We now have four main channels:
- The most direct is to ask for feedback when we fix a problem -
and to act on it. We customised our NetSuite CRM/ERP system to
include a feedback form with every case closed. If the feedback is
bad, we call the customer straight back, find out the complaint and
resolve it.
- We worked on preventing problems and downtime. We use low
feedback scores from closed cases to change the way we do things
and correct poor setups. We have a range of remote management tools
adapted from large enterprises to audit each computer every day and
detect and fix any early warnings or actual problems before they
affect our customers. We also promoted a support team leader
in charge of monitoring the closed cases to find patterns of
repetitive faults that might signify a deeper problem.
- We made our systems meet the needs of our customers' staff. We
used to talk to our main customer contacts about what they needed,
but we were missing the end-users' needs, so we sent out 'IT Wish
List' wallcharts. We also appointed technical managers for each
customer who make regular site visits - not to fix specific
problems - but to talk to the staff and scout for niggling problems
we're not hearing about.
- The final channel (for now) is to make our systems meet the
needs of our customers' businesses. We've created formal strategic
reviews, with templated questionnaires, where we ask about their
future business plans, growth, changes, etc. From this and
our analysis of their systems' performance, we can draw up a
technical roadmap and budget.
Key lesson
Don't second guess what the customer and his or her business
needs. Ask questions and start listening.
Top tip
Focus on what really matters to the customer, and drop the
things that don't.
Find out more about Conosco