By Conrad Mills, marketing manager, Xerox Europe
Think about the best customer service you’ve ever had. What made it stand out? Chances are one of the reasons was that when you called, the team at the other end knew exactly what to do.
That’s exactly how I felt when my network recently reached capacity. In fact, my service provider knew about the problem before I did, and contacted me to advise on the programmes that were hogging the most bandwidth, and easy ways for me to fix the problem.
This is a nice example of proactive customer service at its best. But what if your problem is global? What if you’re a CIO looking after an enterprise where technical issues arise at any time of day or night, across multiple offices? In this light, establishing global customer support looks a good deal more complex.
This was an issue Xerox looked at when we set up our managed print services (MPS) model over 10 years ago. The key aim for this approach was global consistency, something that can’t be achieved by setting up individual support offices here there and everywhere.
So we decided to set up the Xerox Global Delivery Centre, a network global delivery centres for all of our MPS customers and partners along with their service providers.
With Xerox software proactively monitoring an entire print fleet, including volumes, utilisation and associated costs, we are able to fix problems before the customer is even aware of them, and take a significant burden off the IT helpdesk.
This global delivery capability is part of our belief that customer service can be more than the traditional call centre, and become an active part of a business that contributes to the bottom line. It’s why we are listed as a leader for MPS in IDC’s EMEA Managed Print Services 2012 Hardcopy Vendor Analysis and are used by multi-national firms around the world.
How is customer service making a difference to your business? If you have any thoughts you’d like to share, please add them below.
