Challenging Churn and Delivering Service Provider Excellence

As a growing number of businesses migrate their unified communications (UC) solutions to cloud-hosted networks, increasing network complexity, service providers must deliver around-the-clock service quality and availability. As the demand for bandwidth is ever-increasing, the way to meet rising customer expectations is to minimize churn and deliver reliable performance and business continuity.

Service Provider Excellence

Customers have a plethora of service provider choices. In a crowded marketplace, how can you rise above the competition?

Here are some best practices that will set you apart in the eyes of the customer:

1. Focus On Speed and Efficiency
Providing single-source access to performance data on devices and applications coupled with real-time alerts to IT staff will allow service providers to quickly detect and address problems. This gives you more time to address issues before they get worse, improving customer satisfaction and keeping your own organization efficient.

2. Offer Faster Problem Resolution
Time is money and when a system is offline, every second counts. 24/7 monitoring of device availability and performance metrics coupled with real-time alerts make problems easier to detect and quicker to resolve for minimal negative impact.

3. Monitor Your Entire Network
Identify problems and monitor everything on your network to enhance the customer experience, improve business intelligence and make team connections more productive. As a service provider, you can use it to manage customers more effectively.

4. Reduce Customer Churn
Outstanding service quality and fast problem resolution increase customer satisfaction across the board, which significantly minimizes churn. Improve your bottom line by spending less time and resources on restoring customer faith and more on engaging new and prospective customers.

The only way to cut through the noise in a crowded marketplace is to consistently deliver efficiency, innovation, service and cost-savings. Service providers that incorporate these best practices into their day-to-day operations will continue to grow and thrive for years to come—while leaving their competition in the dust.

5. Showcase Solutions Customers Didn’t Know Were Possible 
Often customers enter the buying process with a predetermined set of expectations. Take the time to help them learn about capabilities and services they didn’t realize were possible. For example, Mitel Premium Software Assurance will ensure you meet mission-critical deliverables and provide tools to better service your customers. While you’re exceeding customer expectations, you’ll also be getting an easy return on investment.

6. Highlight How Your Work Is An Investment, Not An Expense
This subtle change in perspective will not only help you see your opportunity differently, but it will also change the expectations of your customer. Help them see how their investment is one they can get real value from long-term—with an outstanding ROI. 

The Cost of Hidden Issues on the Network

Every day, your network faces pressure from continuous demands, which can cause frustrating delays and a negative user experience. Without the right monitoring tools, you can be blindsided by preventable problems, scrambling to make them right and wasting both time and resources.

A Closer Look: How to Improve Service Quality with Mitel Performance Analytics

In 2006, Mitel’s own support team had a 65% remote fix rate for their customers. This meant that 35% of the time they had to dispatch a field engineer to a customer site to resolve the problem. Naturally, that added the cost of time and money for both the customer and company. Over the years, with the help of Mitel Performance Analytics (MPA), the company has seen a 30% increase in their remote fix rate, bringing it up to 95% overall. Over the last nine years, they have been able to manage a customer’s system remotely thanks to the greater capability to provide secure remote access though Mitel Performance Analytics.

Discover more about MPA >

With MPA, partners deliver proactive network performance management with tools to detect, troubleshoot and address voice quality problems. They can offer round-the-clock monitoring, alerts, testing tools and remote access. With no VPN required, this single-click access to monitored devices makes it easy for IT support to be able to securely and remotely access and resolve the problem.

Remote access, while allowing service providers to do their job effectively, can be a pain point for service providers because security access is paramount to the customer. It’s important for the service provider to prove to the customer and earn their trust to overcome this objection, which will allow them to offer the best service possible through remote fixes.

“The ability to persuade [a] customer improved once we standardized on a secure remote access tool which combined the access capability with other features that we could offer the customer in terms of monitoring and management,” says Cenydd Burden, Director of UK Service Delivery of Mitel.

After moving all their customers to the Mitel Performance Analytics platform, they saw their remote fix rates rise significantly. Today, customers are pleased to experience a speedier response to issues because their system is being accessed remotely. This has also enabled the company to reduce the cost of providing support to their customers.

Mitel Performance Analytics for a Responsive, Reliable Business Communications Network 

With millions of end users and thousands of partners, Mitel relies on innovative solutions to keep them connected and doing business, while maintaining service quality.

Mitel needed a solution that would monitor the performance of their entire network including third-party and proprietary devices, detecting problems and alerting administrators before the user experienced voice quality disruption or downtime. 

MPA not only resolved the issues of detecting and alerting administrators when problems occur, but offers tools to help resolve the problem, including secure remote access and active testing solutions.

Read More About The Deployment Here >