Complexity to Clarity With an Expert Team: Customer Support
In this final customer success series interview, we learn how the combination of bespoke service, innovative best practices, and swift crisis management exemplifies our support team’s commitment to setting industry standards in customer care and facility services.
Jennifer Sams
Senior Content Marketing Manager
The call center is where the action happens once a customer is onboarded and up and running on ServiceChannel. Vice President of Customer Care and Facility Services, Mark Sammons, has spent two decades in the business — and knows what it takes to run a tight ship. He also knows that the human connection, coupled with accessibility, is what makes interacting with the ServiceChannel support team a positive experience for our customers.
How is ServiceChannel’s support services different from other software platforms?
I think it’s the people — we have high standards for who we hire. Even though we are a process-driven technology company, we understand that relationships with our customers and our providers are the keys to our success. I came to ServiceChannel because I saw that it was a growing business in a growing industry — and after a couple of interviews, I noticed how much they care about bringing on the right people for the call center.
A Team Focused on Solving Problems Quickly
How do you keep track of the unique preferences and requirements of each company?
Our customers can create a personalized wiki, which is a website that allows collaborative content creation and editing; it’s where they provide us with their procedures. Every customer is a little bit different, so we customize how we handle their calls. All our customers have their own dedicated phone number, so we know which customers are calling in, and our call center agents can bring up the wiki and find out exactly how to address whatever the customer needs. And our customer success representatives work with the customer to update their wiki on a regular basis.
Creating Customized Processes
How do you ensure the call center is always prepared and adaptable?
Even with the unpredictable nature of emergencies, we have a lot of data — and we have technologies that allow us to analyze it, not only at the call-center level but also at the customer level. So, we analyze that down to the trade, down to the customer, and overall, for our entire customer base. We know how many calls are going to come in during the different times of year and the different seasons, and we know exactly how many people to staff at any given time of the year so we’re able answer the phones very quickly and still maintain a high quality of service.
We can even predict when emergencies are going to happen, so our emergency dispatch team is properly staffed — and we also have other tenured agents that can jump in and help with emergencies. We provide reports to the customers so they can see how we’re performing, and we use the data to make our call center more efficient; to ensure the maximum speed and accessibility.
How do you and your team ensure such a rapid response time during emergencies?
Emergency work orders are sometimes so critical that our customers can’t even open their stores. They may be losing revenue and impacting customer experience. That’s when our emergency dispatch response team, or EDR, gets involved. They’re a select group of highly trained, highly experienced individuals who have the highest statistics, highest quality of service of all our call center agents. The EDR team acts on emergency work orders that haven’t been accepted by a provider within 30 minutes. They review the work order and the customer wiki to find out what steps need to be taken, then they make outbound calls to make it happen.
Personalized Service for Every Customer
How does the EDR team coordinate with other departments or teams within ServiceChannel in emergency situations?
Our EDR team has access to the wiki, of course, but their customer success managers and supervisors are there in our special EDR chat rooms, 24/7/365. Understanding that for our emergency work orders, the customer only has up to four hours to get someone on-site, so every little interaction needs to be as quick as possible. I’ve watched those chats happen, and when they need help, someone answers within seconds.
Technology With a Human Touch
How does your team leverage data to make the call center as efficient as possible?
We have a lot of data, and we have technologies that allow us to analyze it not only at the call-center level but also at the customer level. We provide reports to the customers so they can see how we’re performing, and we use the data to make our call center more efficient for them to ensure the maximum amount of speed and accessibility.
And since we have hundreds of customers in several different industries, we’re able to leverage our knowledge of different customers and the way they do business with new customers who sign on, especially with the call center. A new customer may not know the best way to handle their own processes and calls, and we can leverage our massive amounts of information and data to give them some best practices and streamline their processes.
Balancing Speed and Quality of Response
Fortive acquired ServiceChannel in 2021. How has this partnership enhanced the company’s ability to service customers?
Being a part of Fortive has been invaluable for ServiceChannel. Not only has it helped us create more standard business practices, but they’ve also brought in the Fortive Business System for overall process improvement. We have daily management meetings, we document all our processes, and we’re constantly watching our key performance indicators or metrics to see where we can do better.
