As a CTO of a 3rd party telephony monitoring and maintenance provider, I have learned a lot about how companies like to communicate - both internally and externally. When a customer or a partner's customer has a problem with their phone system, we need to be able to efficiently communicate with the right individuals, using their preferred method of communication. This can be particularly challenging when their preferred method of communication is the same phone system that is having problems!
This blog will be exploring the different tools and technologies that our customers and partners have adopted to optimize their communication infrastructures. Sometimes I’ll be asking for your feedback – how have you addressed this issue of customer-vendor communication?
A picture is worth a thousand words… or in this case, thousands of dollars in cost savings. One of our customers has 89 sites located around the country that was requiring the equivalent of 8 full time telecom support staff to support the multiple vendors and phone systems in use at each of the sites. We were hired to streamline the maintenance and support of these systems, and within a few months the in-house telecom support staff was reduced to 1.5 employees.
Dramatic improvement in basic maintenance communication was the key to the solution. We gave our customer secure access to a service portal that provided a single ticketing system, a live monitoring dashboard, and extensive per-site documentation that included digital photographs of all the phone systems at each of the sites. Time to resolution of system issues improved considerably. The centralized integrated maintenance system gave the internal telecom staff substantially more time to focus on day-to-day issues and improve their customer satisfaction scores. The maintenance service portal also enabled the internal support staff to submit MAC requests, view performance reports, and nearly eliminate the many phone calls they used to have to make to properly support the multi-vendor communications environment.
As much as I'd like to think that the technology behind the service portal was the sole reason for improving the communication efficiency for this customer, it also required us to understand the customer’s current telecom support process and corporate communication philosophies. We needed to understand the methods and procedures of how our customer communicated currently before we could intelligently advise them on how to begin communicating more effectively. If the customer doesn't believe you understand their pain, they will unlikely believe that you know how to relieve it.
Tell me what issues you have with your current telecom environment, provider, or customer? What do they do that delights you? Thanks, and let’s keep the lines of communication open…..