Jonathon Moody, VP Operations
A quick introduction: I’m Jonathon Moody, VP Operations at Versature. My day-to-day usually has me working between our Sales, Support and Provisioning teams to make sure we are everything we can be for our clients.
In my first post to our blog I’m going to review an often overlooked approach to providing top level customer service.
While more and more of our clients are working with our teams via email, phone calls still remain our most common means of contact. This means we need to make sure that when we receive a call, that we find an available staff member with the right skill set to help out as quickly as possible.
Big businesses, such as the traditional telephone companies, gave up trying to provide quality or quick responses years ago. Instead ,far too often, they subject their clients to endless menus and long waits to reach even the lowest level technician.
At Versature we use a mix of Queues and Ring Groups to help our clients reach knowledgeable staff without a long wait. We use a short menu to help make sure we track down suitable staff but rely on all staff during busy times to try and answer all calls. If we can’t answer a call within two minutes we send the call to voicemail.
Yes, you read that right; Voicemail. But let me roll back a few years to explain where this comes from.
As a growing business our executive team has always believed that the best experience for a caller is to reach a staff member from any team instead of an endless array of Queue music or messages saying how we value your business but can’t answer your call.
For this reason, we avoided introducing hold music or any repeating message that clients associate with the long Queue waits used by our competitors. The problem with a Ring Group, where callers hear ringing instead of music or a custom message is that most will only wait so long before they hang up, assuming that their call has been mis-routed.
However as our teams grew in size it became clear that in some cases we really needed more than 20 seconds to find an available, knowledgeable staff member to answer your call. With this in mind we revamped our setup and introduced up to 2 minutes of music so that an available staff member could be tracked down. A caller listening to music or a message rather than ringing is much more likely to wait beyond 20 seconds for their call to be answered.
How we group our staff and distribute the call is a post for another day but the basic idea is that under normal circumstances no call should go unanswered and if it did you should go to voicemail after 2 minutes instead of waiting indefinitely like you might with one of our competitors.
The result is that most of the time your call will be answered by a member of the team you are looking for; but if not, most likely a member of another team, and failing that, go to voicemail. We won’t keep you on hold for a half hour (or two!), but we will call you back as soon as possible since voicemail messages are sent directly into our trouble ticket system and assigned to a technician for the follow up call.
Of course the Queue and Ring Group functionality we use to manage calls is the same as the service we offer our clients. Please get in touch with our staff if we can help you improve the level of service you offer to your clients.
We are working with the talented folks over at inMotion to create an Explainer Video that will, in 2 minutes or less, explain what it is we do and why you should work with us. The process has been a lot of fun so far, mostly focused on the script and timing. At the moment, we are on draft # 6 of the script, so as you can imagine we’ve been busy refining our message and tweaking the storyline.
You can click on the images to see them in a larger version. It will be great fun to see these characters come to life over the next few weeks as the video is animated and edited. Look for the finished product to be available sometime over the summer – it will probably be featured prominently on Versature’s website when it is ready. I’ll try to update the blog with details on our progress as we move forward through the different stages.
