As a baseline, no matter your company’s size, complexity, or industry, one thing your vendor must have is a heart for service. Below is a checklist to evaluate a heart for service:
Checklist to evaluate “Heart for Service” of your vendor
- Are they passionate about good customer service in their other lines of business?
- How long have their customers been with them?
- Ask for references that can speak to a time when the vendor fell down and made it right. Don’t always ask for references where everything was bunnies and rainbows!
- Do they share their support metrics? More importantly, do they track this internally? You can’t fix what isn’t measured! How quickly do they respond and resolve issues? Do they track customer satisfaction? How is this done? If they do these things, their answers will be unencumbered and free-flowing.
- Beyond the support department, look at other departments of the prospective Unified Communication vendor’s business. This will be a good indicator of their service culture. How friendly and easy is it to do business with their accounting department? How quickly do their salespeople respond with answers? How quickly does the phone get answered in general? How fast and do they respond to general company inquiries via email?
- Do they put their money where their mouth is? Is there a penalty if they fall short?
- Do they promise perfection? If they do, run. We’re all humans working on imperfect technology. Perfection is far from realistic. This is a good test of their integrity.
Learn about this and more in my upcoming webinar, The Number One Mistake When Choosing a Unified Communications Solution this November 3rd, 2015 at 1:30 p.m. PDT. Can’t make it? Register and download a white paper that offers easy checklists, red flags, and key questions to ask when choosing a UC vendor. Don’t forget to let me know what you think or if you have any questions!
About Inflow Communications:
Founded in 1997, Inflow is one of the nation’s top Unified Communications and Contact Center consultants in today’s market. Pioneers in cloud unified communications and cloud contact center success, Inflow is the first company to provide contact center consulting and training focused solely on helping you elevate your customer experience.
With over 200,000 endpoints supported under Inflow’s innovative success programs around the world, Inflow built its brand and reputation around providing unrivaled customer support. Inflow is in Mitel/ShoreTel’s top 2% in global customer satisfaction and quickly acquired a top spot with RingCentral, Genesys Cloud, and NICE inContact.
By partnering with Inflow, you can expect the highest level of strategic consultation, execution, and optimization available in the industry.
