It never rains but it pours on Customer Street

At 3pm yesterday our local BT exchange had a failure that left our head office and support centre without internet connectivity. As all our systems are web based and the data is held offsite in one of our secure data centres we were unable to do any work for the last three hours of our working day and nearly 200 people were frustrated in their roles.

I personally oversaw the issue due to the seriousness and despite many, many phone calls to our service provider Thus plc, we were still off until 3am. What was more frustrating was the complete lack of call backs and coherent strategy on their part. We were left calling them to ask for progress reports and despite calling them at 9.45pm to ask them to update their record to change the contact number on the issue to my mobile number (from our technical managers) I had not received any updates at midnight. Unbelievably when I called them they had lost any record of the updated contact details and had tried to call the old number on the account to tell us the fault was resolved. It wasn't and they hadn't tested it and I pointed this out and off we went again.

At 3am BT resolved the fault but I have every confidence that had we not chased constantly we would not have had the issue resolved.

Now the purpose of this post is two fold. Firstly let me apologise to anyone who is waiting for a call back from your Customer Street agent because unfortunately our sophisticated work tracking system (QAD) is completely web based and runs from our data centres and so our teams could not access their diaries and call backs or indeed any new support issues.

Furthermore it has given us some useful training and learning material to show how not to deal with a customer and you can be assured that my team at Customer Street are constantly learning and improving our systems to ensure that we never provide the levels of support that are offered by some organisations and get call centres such a bad name.

At Customer Street we employ a full time "Business Process Manager" and you can read his own blog. Mark is tasked by me to root out every small problem and track every failing in our organisation. Gradually, day by day we make some small and some large improvements but we never stop striving for perfection and I am confident that our customers are aware of how fast things have changed around here.

Customer Street is about customer service

You hear the phrase "plain old customer service" used in life but I don't believe there is any such thing. Plain old customer service meant people dealing with people but the world has changed. Now it is rarer and rarer for people to meet face to face and have meaningful discussions. In this day and age everything is done via the internet and telephone which means businesses have to change but most businesses have not properly grasped this.

At Customer Street we learned a lot from the mistakes we made previously. When I took over this role I had a number of opportunities to address our problems including throwing more people at our problem to see if we could deal with our customers more effectively but one thing was for sure, if we didn't improve our customer service quickly we wouldn't have a customer service problem for very long as they would all leave us.

I decided to take a new look at customer service and we started from the ground up to review systems, roles and responsibilities and I am pleased to say that it has been an outstanding success for us. The review is not complete but we have slashed call times, increased satisfaction dramatically and become much more organised. We have introduced a number of new systems which again have been designed from the ground up to match customers problems with agents who know how to fix them.

All of these changes have actually lead to us needing less staff to provide a much better service. Its truly incredible and we are aiming higher.

I read an article today which encompassed the approach I take to this problem in that companies with less foresight (and indeed us in a former life) think it is acceptable to have customers waiting in queues of several minutes while incompetent agents hide behind phone systems and in some cases take approaches with customers that they would never dare in real life and face to face. We have turned that on its head. By implementing a new system where one person deals with a customers issue from beginning to end we have substantially changed the fobbing off that continues throughout most call centres. By introducing a point scoring pay deal that rewards agents who work hard and fix lots of customer issues we get through work loads we would never have done in the past. Best of all if a customer calls back in with further issues the agents bonus is reversed until they properly fix the issue meaning there is no incentive to "get rid" of a customer quickly without fixing problems properly.

At Customer Street we know that our telephones are our shop window. If you had to queue many minutes to get in to Marks and Spencer you would soon stop going there and yet many companies like ours think it is OK to ask people to queue for many minutes to speak to someone. I, like everyone else out there dread calling companies with queueing systems and find it refreshing in the rare instance that someone answers quickly. At Customer Street we re-invested the support centre model and this is allowing our customers to get through that virtual door more quickly and then leave the problem with us, go home, have a cup of tea and wait for us to PHONE THEM with the solution.

Now its true that my approach will horrify some traditional call centre managers and indeed it sent shivers through the spines of some of my colleagues on the board of Iomart plc but I can safely say that it was the correct thing to do. Despite the doubts about how it would be received by our customer base and the "naysayers" within our organisation we have had excellent feedback that the new system works great for customers and our support agents alike. I know that in time each and every one of our customers will come to appreciate the changes we made to ensure they can get in our shop more quickly and with no fuss.

We aim to get our customer service 100% right in all cases but I know my team slip up sometimes. If they do, let me know and I can assure we will learn from it and address your issues directly. Email me via our special customer service quality control squad.

The birth of Customer Street

Welcome to my blog that hopefully will help to familiarise people with the work of Iomart Group, of which I am a director and in particular the division called Customer Street which accounts for nearly 80% of the group turnover and employs over 400 people in eight centres across the UK.

I have previously posted under another blog "being a director of Ufindus" but decided that as most of our work is now encompassed in the Customer Street banner I would start a separate blog under this heading.

I hope my avid (but limited) readership will continue to read postings and comment as they see fit to help me with my role which sees me responsible for the development and customer support divisions at Customer Street. Indeed my role covers everything that is non-sales, from arranging for a leaking tap to be fixed through to dealing with banks and the UK banking systems to maintain and improve our collections methods. There is much more in between. My role is wide and varied and it surprises me daily what lies in store.

Indeed my interest in blogging came about because I was trying to use it as a forum to express my dissatisfaction at numerous competitors public (blogging) criticism of our group which had come about I believe out of jealousy and frustration at our domination of the market we operate in. In addition I used my blog as an opportunity to honestly inform our customer base of the work we were doing since I took over to improve our customer service.

During the last 12 months I have learned plenty about our customer service problems and fixed hundreds of individual issues with the help of my new hard working and willing team and I am very confident that we offer a world class service now. There are still some doubters out there but let me say that no company dominates the search engine rankings on behalf of their customers more than we do and most large brands have to accept, unpalatable as it is, that when you are at the top of your tree there will always be somebody who is not quite so successful trying to knock you of your perch.

As a part of the blogging process of both me and my colleagues around the business which I am now encouraging, I hope we will show that we are number one in our field because we understand the market and are working tirelessly to improve our packages for our valuable customers. No other company in the UK can claim the size of market share we can. No other company can claim to build over 100 custom websites each week. No other company has over 130 (and growing) top performing sites out there. No other company has such a skilled and dedicated development team that we do here at CustomerStreet.com.

I guess that Customer Street has the most significant internet marketing workforce of any company throughout Europe and I am proud of this.