Zendesk, which serves over 10,000 companies, is extremely affordable, Urlocker says. [CIs can explore the pricing structure here]

Customer Service Transparency

ANC was already pretty committed to customer service, but there was room for improvement, says ANC chief technology officer Mark Stross.

The transparency that ANC Help Desk creates is critical, he says. ANC can study the documentation to determine reasons for failures and how to fix them more quickly. Stross is frank, adding that other integrators should elevate their approach to delivering on service contracts.

In ANC Help Desk’s case, all information is shared with the clients. Transparency, Stross says, is lacking in the integration community. “If you’re going to charge for a service, you’d better be accountable. You’d better be able to prove to them what you’re doing. Finally, you need to be able to improve your own internal services. You do that by keeping data.”

Zendesk actually generates customer service satisfaction data, Urlocker says. The software provider gets a 25 to 30 percent response rate on simple post-service interaction surveys, allowing its clients to keep customer satisfaction ratings.

Companies tend to focus on focus on the wrong data when evaluating their processes, in Urlocker’s opinion. He considers customer satisfaction ratings to be the “one business metric that they should focus on.”

Urlocker agrees with Stross about the importance of transparency, emphasizing that it can prevent companies from losing clients by opening the lines of communications. “It used to be that the only way [companies] would know [a customer] is unhappy is when they leave. Now you have that visibility early, so you can take steps to correct it.”

As important as customer service has become in the commercial electronics industry, Urlocker points out that it’s a high-stakes game in recent years. “When things go wrong, people tend to take it to the streets through Twitter and the web. There are so many options now for [clients] to find other competitive products on the web or with other vendors, so it really makes sense to deliver great service.”

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About the author

Tom LeBlanc - Editor-in-Chief, CI, Tom

Tom has been covering electronics integration since 2003. Prior to being named editor-in-chief of CI, he was senior writer and managing editor of CE Pro. Before that, he wrote for the sports department of the Boston Herald. Migrating to magazines, he was a staff editor for a golf publication and an outdoor sports publication. Follow him on Twitter @leblanctom.

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