Last Friday, T-Mobile experienced a few glitches in their network that affected a decent amount of their customers. During this time, T-Mobile’s CEO, John Legere, hopped on Twitter and started fielding customer facing support issues.
In my eyes, that’s a huge leap forward for a top-tier service provider in any field. To have the CEO of the company whose service you subscribe to hop to it and get on social media, or, even better, the phones to re-assure customers that they are working on the problem personally says a great deal about a companies level of commitment to customer service. For companies that contend for the title of best customer service and support, this top-down approach makes companies like T-Mobile stand out from the rest.
It reminds me of how we do things at Stephouse Networks.
Whenever a Stephouse Networks customer calls in for customer services or support, they get a real, local person every single time. I took a customer support call last week and after saying my “Hello! This is David with Stephouse,” she responded with, “Hey, wow! A real person!”
The minute you choose a phone menu option towards one of our support departments, I guarantee you’ll get in touch with one of my teammates. We keep the phone lines open to all our employees because it’s a chance to get to know our customers a little better. It’s our way of working towards providing the best customer service and support that we can.
We’re very accessible considering that none of our crew lives in some other state or somewhere across the world. We’re all citizens of the Northwest, living and working in Portland and Southwest Washington. One time, I had a client call up from nearby Downtown Portland and I heard the same police siren in their receiver as I could hear out my window. Now that’s local!
When you call our support line, it’s going to be one of us who takes your call, listens to your issue, and then tries our best to find a solution that will help solve that problem or at least shine light upon what can make things better. It’s never a drag or a hassle– we just figure if a neighbor that we respect asks us for help, we’re going to try our best.
Our level of service goes beyond the support office.
Here at Stephouse nearly all employees answer customer calls. There is a decent chance that when you call us, you’ll get in touch with people from our product & software development, billing, sales, and even marketing departments. This might seem like a stark contrast to companies with organizational structures or job descriptions that prohibit certain people from interfacing with customers.
The ability to speak with our customers, listen to their challenges, empathize with them, and seek out a solution empowers every member of our team to do the best at their roles. Stephouse Networks respects every opportunity to interface with a customer. You guys teach us all kinds of things– how to improve our network, support, billing, and other services. We figure this is the right path toward providing best customer service and support that we can.
[Editor’s note: During the writing of this post, Stephouse’s owner was out in the field working alongside our Field Service Technicians, and later helped our Sales team with a proposal. He sets the bar for dedication to our customers.]
As a consumer, what level of service do you expect from the companies that provide you service? What things are most important to you?
Maybe it’s a real, local person on the other end of the phone. Maybe it’s not being read a series of troubleshooting steps out of a script when you finally get hold of a real person.
We’ve been able to leverage this awesome relationship with our communities into empowering our company closer to its 11th year of service. Maybe it’s something more companies should take seriously!
