Whose responsibility is what?
I have noticed that Customer Service at most of the carriers we work with has been on a downward spiral lately. While I cannot control the staffing trends of different carriers, I do often ponder exactly who should be responsible when a customer has an outage, but more importantly when they have a chronic or hard down service issue.
We at TelecomMedic take service tickets very seriously. Each of our customers receives a welcome package with all of the pertinent information about who to contact when things are not working correctly. This package has the contact numbers and emails for the vendor as well as contact information for TelecomMedic directly. We instruct the customer to submit or call in a trouble ticket immediately when they have an issue and then immediately get that trouble ticket number to us at TelecomMedic via email, website submission or with a call to our 800 number.
From there, we monitor the trouble ticket and make sure it is being handled correctly. 80% of the time it flows through normally and for the most part we are only having to do some minimal management to ensure our client is being taken care of as quickly as possible. It is the other 20% of the time, which seems to be on the rise, when we have issues.
TelecomMedic, like other agencies, have our own contracts and we use Master Agencies for other vendors. When an issue exists and it is with a vendor where we have a direct relationship it is all on us to help the customer and take care of the issue. But, what happens when we use a Master Agency for that particular vendor?
This has been a major issue for us lately with a particular vendor that was recently purchased by a certain ‘managed communications’ company in Macon, GA. We have a customer that has been down over SIX times in the last 9 months due to vendor outages of one sort or another. The average hold time on their toll free number has been abysmal (over an hour just to submit a ticket, often worse from there) and the communication back and forth has been nearly non-existent. We have leaned quite heavily on the Master Agency that we use for that vendor and while they have tried hard to help, they really don’t have the back office to support this type of issue.
I believe that when we go through a Master Agency, they have to roll up their sleeves and should exercise all the leverage they have on said vendor. When agencies such as TelecomMedic don’t have the direct contract with a vendor we can’t escalate the trouble ticket (like we can when it is our own contract). This can cause a bottleneck and a very unhappy customer (especially when experiencing a complete outage at 3:00pm on a Friday…).
It has made us here at TelecomMedic take a hard look at each Master Agency we work with and I think it is something the Masters need to look at themselves. Are they there just to write us a check every month for booking business through them? Or, are they a true partner to be there after hours when the customer goes down? I am guessing a number of Masters will come back and say “we pay you at the top level so that does not come with the support you are asking for.” Normally, I would agree with that statement. But the cold hard truth is if we don’t own the contract, we can’t do anything as we have zero leverage. In my opinion the Masters must get involved.
The biggest advantage to the end user working with the Indirect Side of the business is to have multiple resources when ‘you know what’ hits the proverbial fan. We sell based on this fact. We tell customers things like “with us you can call XYZ Telecom on your own, and/or we can help you out in those situations”. If a Master Agency is involved we can say things like “the people we put this business through do a million dollars a year with XYZ Telecom so they will be able to get through faster than you as a 5k biller.” We refer to it as ‘Consolidating Buying Power’, which is just a fancy way of saying that we can escalate and expedite problem resolution based on current and future book of business with said XYZ Telecom.
I guess my point is that Telecom companies are scaling down their customer service people to save money at an alarming rate (especially with all of the mergers and acquisitions going on these days), so who is there to help? Who is truly responsible? I would say it is first and foremost the vendors themselves, but when that fails it has to fall to the company that has the contract with the vendor. I am interested to see everyone’s thoughts on this..