Why Successful MPS Customer Engagement Requires Embracing Change
By Brian “Sparky” Farwell, CSS Group at CCI Systems
How to use automation and predictive analytics to scale services and deliver a better user experience.
Customer engagement is the heart of managed services. In my experience, successful engagement lies in the ability to adapt to change while maintaining reliable and cohesive service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. While continuity and reliability are the roots that hold managed services firmly in place, opportunities for change provide the solid, yet flexible branches required to expand and scale business services to new heights. This ultimately increases customer satisfaction.
Customer Engagement Starts with Employee Engagement
Any MSP will tell you that staffing the customer service department is one of their biggest challenges. Research conducted by The Quality Assurance & Training Connection (QATC) found the average annual turnover rate for agents in U.S. contact centers is between 30-45 percent, more than twice the average for all other occupations. A primary reason call centers experience such high turnover is due to low employee engagement because of repetitive or monotonous work. Holding onto employees and keeping them motivated is a high priority and represents one “branch” of the necessary change required for successful customer engagement. By automating troubleshooting and resolving issues without requiring employees to perform menial tasks, you enable them to work on more rewarding and fulfilling assignments. Hopefully, a reduction in staff turnover follows.
Another “branch” is the ability to expand services and rapidly scale while improving service quality. For example, the company I work for provides monitoring and contact center services for ISPs, hospitality and multi-family residential companies and their end-customers. By leveraging automation technologies, we’ve been able to quickly scale to support hundreds of thousands of customer devices.
Omnichannel Support Ticketing Is the New Normal
The internet has dramatically changed the way we live and communicate, so much so that we are now experiencing a transformational shift for businesses. Supporting customers with communications and services that blend the online and physical experience has brought us omni-channel communications, another “branch” that provides a seamless customer-first experience. It has been applied to marketing, sales, and support across many industries, and has even worked its way into MSP customer engagements. Users expect omni-channel communications on whatever device they choose with the option to employ a number of disparate communications methods to resolve a single issue.
MSPs can embrace this innovation through omni-channel-driven support ticketing systems that use a combined platform for voice, SMS, text, chat, and email to keep a record of communications and provide key performance indicators (KPIs). Omnichannel customer engagement platforms deliver an improved customer and employee experience, and better business results.
Use Technology to Accelerate Change
To compete today and in the future, MSPs must adapt to continual change, while integrating and coalescing multiple services, platforms, devices, and applications. Accomplishing this “branch” of change requires forward-looking technology in the form of artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, workforce management software and automated alerting and notification.
As a vendor-agnostic shop, CCI Systems accomplishes this using LogicMonitor. Their solution gives us a single pane of glass to monitor applications, devices, and networks. LogicMonitor’s SaaS-based platform alerts us when devices degrade, ports go offline or a myriad of other technical problems arise. Monitoring, ticketing, and notification are integrated with the LogicMonitor system, providing synergies with multiple third-party platforms and a holistic view into customer networks. Rather than the tedious effort of finding problems using multiple, disparate tools, the system automatically alerts and identifies where problems are in order for proactive corrective action to be taken. Not only does this mean that issues are resolved sooner, but it also lessens the burden for IT teams who are increasingly juggling more responsibilities with less time and resources.
Embrace Automation
MSPs must move beyond the traditional metric-driven, first call resolution approach that determines success by how quickly trouble tickets are opened and closed. In addition to ticket resolution metrics, MSPs must also use customer satisfaction, or CSAT KPIs, to track the customer experience. Today’s customers are no longer willing to engage in long conversations. As a result, customer engagement times have reduced from minutes to seconds, regardless of the specific communication channel. Optimizing the customer engagement process using automated AI-driven personas with predictive analytics is another “branch” that can quickly resolve customer questions, and automatically assist in moving customers toward revenue-generating services. When human involvement is required, the AI persona puts the customer in contact with a representative. The financial benefits of this type of automated customer engagement can be substantial. In fact, I have a customer that saved 37 percent of their annual contact center costs, with 55 percent of their customer calls answered by automated AI personas.
Make Customer Satisfaction Your Gold Standard
The growth of MSP services will be accomplished by integrating automation and analytics with high-value bundled services tied to holistic backend platforms. MSPs can achieve a competitive advantage with automated services and achieve considerable ROI benefits. The Internet and mobility have brought dramatic societal changes. As these changes weave their way into business, these businesses must adapt. Digital transformation has exponentially accelerated huge changes over the past five years, and the next five years will bring even more accelerated change for MSPs. And with all these changes, those who adapt and branch out with new “customer-first” services will win.
About The Author
Brian “Sparky” Farwell is Director – CSS Group at CCI Systems.