In today’s world, customers hold all the power. With a little help from the internet, customers have an abundance of choices at their fingertips plus the resources needed to educate themselves and make more informed decisions on their own.
Here at The Missing Link, a large part of our ongoing customer satisfaction and retention is achieved by ensuring clients are at the heart of everything we do.
Our customer-focused approach ensures we’re front of mind for our clients through both the good and bad times when they need a trusted advisor that they can rely on. When things do not go right, our Service Experience Team are often the first point of contact for any feedback or issues.
We asked our Service Experience Manager, Callum Walker, some intriguing questions about our service experience team, including, how we measure our success, and the emerging technologies we use to evolve our service in a competitive industry.
Q: Let us start with a brief overview of you and your role here at The Missing Link.
Since joining the industry over ten years ago, I have gained extensive experience in customer-facing technical roles, which led me to my position at The Missing Link. In my role, I am responsible for keeping our customers productive and making sure we respond to any technical issues quickly, focus on the big picture, communicate early and often, and mitigate any impact on their business.
Q: How would you describe our Service Experience Team?
Our Service Experience team is our version of a traditional IT Service Desk. We receive service request or incident tickets from our customers, which are then classified, prioritised and assigned to our engineers. From there, the team investigate, diagnose, recover and resolve. Effective Incident Management, rooted in the industry-leading ITILv4 framework, is key to our success as a team.
Q: Why do we use CSAT as a measurement?
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is an important metric for tracking how our customers are feeling. At the end of every interaction, we ask our customers to provide feedback, which we use to calculate and track our net CSAT score. It’s a real-time data stream that allows us to respond instantly to any issues and gain deep insights into trends over time. It is also a great way to celebrate the great work that the team is doing every day.
Q: How does our CSAT score help us to learn and improve continually?
We are all about continuous improvement, and our CSAT data gives us a rapid feedback loop that enables us to adapt our service delivery to maximise value. We review EVERY client response - positive, neutral and negative, and follow-up appropriately. We are continually learning and evolving our processes to ensure our clients are getting the support they need.
Q: How would you define success personally, and how do you keep your team motivated every day?
Success to me is leading a team that are excited to take on the next challenge together.
One way I keep the team motivated is by visualising our work-in-process (WIP) through a real-time business intelligence dashboard. At a glance, the dashboard shows us how we are tracking - who’s working on what, who may need support, what’s important, and what can wait. Our real-time CSAT score is also incorporated, linking what we are doing to our customers’ satisfaction.
These metrics help keep the team motivated by showing the positive outcomes of every client interaction. There is something immensely satisfying about seeing the enormous amount of work each individual, and the team is doing collectively, and celebrating how that translates into happy clients.
Another motivator is our focus on continuously improving the way we work. We want to run the 100m sprint, not the 200m hurdles. To be successful, our team works collectively to identify anything that is getting in our way - blockers, constraints or bottlenecks. We work together to automate tasks, streamline processes, and clarify documentation.
Q: They say ‘an excellent customer experience starts with a superior employee experience’ how can emerging technologies contribute to this experience?
We’ve worked closely with our automation division to identify tedious and repetitive tasks that can be automated using Robotic Process Automation (RPA). By automating these tasks, we freed the team up from mundane, repetitive work to use their knowledge and experience to focus on more exciting or profitable work. We have seen impressive increases in the speed and accuracy of the tasks we have automated, but most importantly, it has increased the ‘bandwidth’ for the team to work directly with our clients.
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