You should also be able to assess your team’s strengths and weaknesses and decide how best to use them during the project completion process. The process of listening to customer feedback and customer service employee feedback is important, but action is more important. If you demonstrate to your customers and your customer service professionals that your feedback is valuable and that you are listening, you can provide good customer service (or even excellent customer service)!
While the MSP manages daily management services, customer organizations can focus on improving their services. The best customer service professionals have a deep understanding of how their company’s products work. After all, without knowing your product from front to back, they don’t know how to help if customers have problems.
The experience with agents is worth improving: the more your customer service representatives are committed to your business and your career, the better your commitment to customer satisfaction. With that in mind, the location where your data is located and the subsequent local laws to which it is subject can be an important part of the selection process. If you have specific requirements and obligations, you should search for providers that give you the option and control regarding the jurisdiction in which your data is stored, processed and managed. Cloud service providers must be transparent about the locations of their data centers, but they must also take responsibility for finding this information. Sales technology is a transaction obligation and the buyer of result-oriented services often differs greatly from the technology buyer.
Believe it or not, many customer service questions can be great opportunities to make another sale. The chance of selling to an existing customer is 50 to 55% better than selling to a new customer, but only if their representatives know enough to make the right offer at the right time. Each cloud service provider has a unique package of services and pricing models.
When hiring customer service professionals, look for candidates who are good at time management planning and use your time much more responsibly than those who work ad hoc. Instead, customer service is now a central business process where all brands compete at the forefront of the customer experience. To obtain the commercial benefit of customer service, you must hire the best customer service representatives. Customer service employees must have a number of specific characteristics, both personality traits and skills. Company-specific skills include tacit knowledge of unique routines and procedures, corporate culture and informal standards and experience with specific management systems and processes.
One challenge we see most of our Managed Services members struggle with is selling managed services. In recent years, TSIA has conducted multiple studies, benchmark assessments and capacity accelerators that help us identify what these challenges are, how companies address these challenges, and what key capabilities are successful. Managed Services Structure your organization, develop your market strategy and grow your managed services business. You may have a corporate culture where employees expect to be able to walk down the hall to IT instead of calling. IT infrastructure management with external resources is ideal for an organization that needs expert IT skills and experience to manage and secure the IT infrastructure. This eliminates the burden of infrastructure management for your IT staff, freeing them up to provide world-class personalized helpdesk support to everyone in your entire organization.
This may seem obvious, but you would be amazed at how many customers struggle to communicate with your customer service. In fact, 33% of customers say that answering questions efficiently is the most important skill a customer service agent can have. Mumbling, losing focus or using unclear language can be the source of many disgruntled customer experiences. Your agents may be the most empathetic, professional and positive people in the company, but they should also be able to communicate well with customers. Hire good communicators and commit to training everyone in your customer service team.
Many service providers offer comprehensive migration services and even assist in the evaluation and planning phase. Make sure you understand the support provided and map it to project tasks and decide who will do what. Service providers often have technical personnel who can fill skills gaps in their migration teams. With the application of new technologies, newer IT problems arise that your internal team may not have a good solution. If your systems are in the cloud, you need huge resources to support your business solutions. This may not be possible if you only run an IT department for one person.
These are traditionally considered non-portable assets, skills that star artists cannot carry when they change companies. The social capital that a manager develops over a career, ties with other managers, can be valuable asset. These skills overlap with specific business skills because key relationships often stem from the company’s experience, and indeed in our research we have observed the effect of attracting a IT Consulting Services team of former colleagues in later performance. We found that GE executives did better when they were able to bring in other GE alumni. Companies hiring a team of three or more GE executives showed an annual abnormal return of 15.7%, while those who rented one achieved only an abnormal annual return of -16.6%. Even talented executives with the best and most admired management training are not necessarily star CEOs.
George Humphrey is TSIA’s Vice President and Managing Director of Service and Delivery Research and Counseling. Given his extensive experience, George also directly supports the research practice of managed services. He is a veteran of the network and communications industry with over 25 years of experience. Throughout his career, he held various leadership positions in managed services, including global strategy, product line management, marketing, operations and customer management. Once they know the desired results, they must control the technical and operational design of the solution.