Customer Service is the Oil in our Machine

Yesterday my team forwarded me a very nice compliment from one of our customers. They were struggling with a technical issue and called our support team for help. To our customer’s delight, we were quickly able to get them back up and running.

It made me think about some of the customer service experiences I’ve had—both good and bad. I thought about the long hold times, getting passed around to different reps and having to explain my issue multiple times, getting disconnected, and having to repeat the whole process all over again. The good times are not to be forgotten either.

I understand the value of good customer service. That is why it’s such a big part of our corporate culture. Like oil in the machine, it keeps us running smoothly. In this new era of social media, things happen fast, and word of mouth is extremely important. If your product doesn’t work and your customer service isn’t helpful, your business will grind to a halt.

We are fortunate that we aren’t encumbered by the bureaucracy of some of the larger legacy technology companies. As a smaller company, we can be personal with our customers, getting to know them and their technology. However, if smaller companies fail at customer service, they risk customer churn, jeopardizing their base. So, it’s even more critical for smaller companies to get it right.

We recognize the time and money our customers invest in our solution, and the last thing we would ever want is for it to become shelf-ware. That’s why, as part of our post-sales implementation, we spend a lot of time with our new customers to ensure the technology integration is sound and that users get engaged. We take time to get to know the customer’s needs and how to satisfy them. We are finding that high adoption rates quickly lead to more license requests.

However, as much as we try to prevent issues, they happen anyway. Technology changes, people change, and our customers need continued support. Some are simple, asking for reminders on how to do things. Other times, they are more complex technical challenges with infrastructure. Sometimes, it turns out not to be our product at all, but we always try to help.

At Pyramid Analytics, I am proud of our customer support team, spread across three centers in the U.S., Israel, and Amsterdam, in which we support all the major languages in Europe. Unlike other customer service organizations, open tickets remain the responsibility of one person until closed unless it needs to be escalated.

We only hire professionals people with strong business intelligence and technical skills. These people individuals know how to run analytics and have a broad business understanding, and they generally know what the customer is trying to do. In addition, they have a strong foundation in our product, Pyramid Analytics BI Office, and are extremely knowledgeable in how it works. They know how to communicate, are articulate, and, most of all, have a lot of patience.

Of course, what would an analytics company be if it didn’t use analytics? We take great pride in our customer support metrics. We watch the entire support funnel; from the moment a ticket is opened. We track the number of open tickets, time to answer, and time to resolution based on different criteria, among other things. Our anonymous surveys show a 97% satisfaction rate. This is extremely high and a level we strive to keep.