A 139-year-old parent company, recognized as a large outdoor grilling manufacturer and offering a dozen respected brands in both consumer and B2B goods, was preparing to launch a new consumer line. Past experience taught the company that responsive and effective customer service was a critical element of success. Hiccups with new product lines are inevitable, so the company expected higher call volume during the initial year and they didn’t have faith in their current outsourced help desk vendor to handle the launch.
Pain points this client was frequently experiencing:
- Too many escalations
- Unscalable due to a fixed amount of agents
- Undeveloped knowledge base
- Difficult vendor relationship/communication
We’ve heard it all. Here are the most common 6 Challenges Internal Help Desks Face
Issues Affecting The Prospective Client:
Too Many Escalations: When customer service agents are unable to solve a customer’s problem, calls get escalated to busy members of engineering staff, who have more pressing priorities.
Difficult Vendor Relationship: The existing help desk vendor’s performance was below expectations, with little movement toward improvement.
The Opportunity:
Advisor Stephen Hancock, President of Socium Consulting, had a strong relationship with the parent company, and with AppDirect’s resources, he was able to introduce them to several business process outsourcing (BPO) providers that could handle help desk operations.
The parent company looked beyond business offerings and marketing promises to solid evidence of skills and success. They studied data regarding answer time, first call resolution, and net promoter scores among others, and Netfor’s performance across a variety of industries stood out. Even better, Netfor’s pricing model would allow the company to obtain that higher level of service for essentially the same investment. What’s more, the other services in Netfor’s BPO portfolio offered potential additional value to the company.
They selected Netfor, who immediately began the process of ramping up their new customer service desk relationship. Before long, the company also started taking advantage of Netfor’s Field Services capabilities to access a nationwide network of skilled installers and technicians who could respond quickly to new white glove setup requests and repair problems at distant customer locations.
Take a deeper dive into How Netfor Sources, Vets, and Trains Their Field Technicians
Significant Growth Opportunities:
Word of Netfor’s performance began to spread through the parent company’s divisions, and one of the others reached out to Stephen Hancock to explore replacing their current provider, resulting in another large closed deal with ongoing revenue.
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In the second opportunity, an existing brand knew that they would soon face a significant increase in phone calls as they rolled out an unavoidable one-time fix. They couldn’t risk the reputation damage if their buyers had unsatisfying experiences. Netfor’s capabilities were the perfect match to handle the surge in calls while enhancing buyer trust.
“I knew this deal would be a great fit because this client had lots of different business units with many different product lines,” Hancock recalls. “We were able to start with a single business unit and have begun working our way through the other product lines to cross-sell.” He adds that the potential deal value may be many times the amount of the initial opportunity.
