Tamsin Deutrom-Yue: Many business users are realising for the first time that their comms systems are everything, and that, without them, they are completely cut off from colleagues as well as customers.
This lockdown is showing us who the real heroes are. And while NHS professionals, delivery drivers and shop workers are each worth their weight in gold, we shouldn’t be shy about celebrating the work of comms support professionals during this difficult time, says Tamsin Deutrom Yue, Managing Director at Support to Win.
“Many business users are realising for the first time that their comms systems are everything, and that, without them, they are completely cut off from colleagues as well as customers. That really raises the stakes for the quality of support people expect.”
According to Deutrom-Yue, Support to Win experienced a major spike in inbound support calls on behalf of channel partner customers when office-based workers shifted en masse to work from home.
“It’s been a stressful time, especially for end users feeling stranded at home with a technical issue or struggling to understand advanced functions they’ve never had to use before. People are much more emotional than we’ve seen before – they need a bit of patient TLC as well as having their issue dealt with as quickly and professionally as possible.”
In addition to performing as the outsourced in-life support provider for a range of comms/ UC operators and partners, Support to Win has been busy delivering lots more virtual onboarding and ‘assisted plug and play’ services to support new rollouts and platform migrations.
“Lockdown means you can’t get engineers onsite for installs or bring customers in for onboarding training – but that shouldn’t stop you selling, signing up new customers or switching existing ones to new platforms,” added Deutrom Yue.
“We’ve been offering remote, zero-touch onboarding for our clients for the last 18-24 months so we know the ropes and haven’t had to design an approach to cope with the new restrictions. We originally came up with it to help customers preserve margin on small sub-10 seat deployments. Little did we know that it would become our meat and drink for rollouts of all sizes during a worldwide crisis!”
At this time more than any other, comms dealers and other channel partners cannot afford to compromise support levels, and need to show customers how much they care. What’s more, by harnessing virtual and remote support offerings from the likes of Support to Win, many are well set to adapt to changing market dynamics rather than simply ‘keeping the lights on’.
“It’s a very fluid market and the leading players are doing whatever it takes to stay agile. At the end of the day, we’re all relying on the boys and girls on the comms support front line to keep service supply chains moving and help users overcome their comms challenges. And that deserves some credit.”