5 Star Service – our ultimate goal

I joined the company in March and I have been tasked with developing and maintaining a support team that delivers 5 star service to our customers.

I (like many others I’m sure) have experienced some awful customer service over the years from some of the largest brand-name companies around. Lets face it, you generally only phone a customer support line if you have a problem and all you want is for that problem to be fixed as quickly as possible. No-one enjoys the scenario of being on hold for ages and then when you eventually do get through to someone they’re about as helpful as a chocolate teapot!

It is this experience that I want to eliminate for our customers when calling LCN’s support lines. However, having been sat in the customer support office and having been on the receiving end of the calls for the past 3 months, I now appreciate a bit more that it is not that easy and there is no immediate fix. It is not a case of just employing more staff (which is a suggestion I have seen several times from some customers). There are often times when there are no calls coming in at all and it is not good business sense to have 20 people sitting around twiddling their thumbs all day! But at the same time, we do need to try to get the balance right so that we have enough people to cope with the busier times.

Over the coming weeks and months I will be monitoring and assessing all aspects of LCN’s customer support including things like call waiting times and the actual quality of the support provided by our staff. I will then set some challenging (but realistic) internal service standards for our staff to work to.

A new phone system that is being installed in our new premises will help towards this and we have a few other ideas that we will trial once we have moved, all of which are geared towards our ultimate goal of improving the overall customer support provided by LCN.

I’m not going to promise that our customers will never be held in a queue again but it is certainly my intention to make your customer support experience with LCN an acceptable and satisfactory one.

Here’s where you can also help…..

I think the best way to find out what areas of our support need most improvement would be to get feedback from you, our customers. Please use this link, feedback@lcn.com, if you wish to make any comments (positive or negative) about the customer support you have experienced from LCN and feel free to make any suggestions about how we can improve our service to you. You won’t necessarily get a reply from us but I can assure you that all comments will be read and taken into account.