In the past decade, customer retention has become just as important as closing sales. With that, managing customer expectations has also become a priority for businesses.
But once a sale has been made, the egg timer is flipped on its head and the sands of time trickle down until the newest customer can start using the solution and get the most out of their investment.
The growth of cloud usage has now added a level of expectation to the customer, where before installation of certain systems could take weeks, enterprises can be set up and ready to roll out within hours.
Although that is a benefit to the businesses, a new level of expectation has been set for service providers,
particularly of their onboarding process, a key factor that ASC Technologies President at ASC Americas Katrin Henkel says can leave a lasting impression.
“The onboarding process is always the first impression that administrators or users have of your solution,” said Henkel. “If the users open the solution and find it too complicated, they will not use it, they will avoid it.
“From there they will use other ways to do their job, or even waste time because they need additional training or ask their colleagues how to use the solution.
”For companies which are unable to meet compliance requirements, this can lead to punishments such as fines. Therefore it is important for a business like ours to provide compliance solutions that can be easily integrated and used to avoid such disadvantages.”
Familiarity
ASC Technology provides communications recording solutions to businesses in regulated industries, such as financial institutions, healthcare organisations and public offices, natively on Teams.
Although call recording solutions are widely available through the collaboration platform, ASC Technology has developed the only native solution that is compliant with the regulations that various industries have to abide by and can be accessed via the Teams Platform.
According to Henkel, one of the USPs of the platform is the quick onboarding process, adding that administrators find a level of familiarity with the solution now that it is on Teams as a part of Microsoft 365 and the Azure environment.
“Basing your solution on systems and infrastructure that is familiar to the end-user and system administrators saves a lot of money and time for our customers,” said Henkel.
“In traditional onboarding processes, the system administrators spend a lot of time bringing new solutions into their current environment. Using technology that is familiar to the IT team, that they already work with and know what to do, means there is no training, so your customer setup is more like walking them through the solution.
“With the integration of Azure Active Directory, ASC provides a fast and easy way to manage different user groups. It is easy to implement solutions that users are already familiar with. Most companies work with Microsoft products like Office 365, so individual configurations and group assignments can be made without trouble.
“This familiarity is also very important in regulated markets too where a business must ensure certain conversations are recorded as using an environment that employees know and can use efficiently reduces and prevents errors that lead to fines. ASCs configuration options cover all compliance issues. These extensive but easy-to-define options ensure that all data that need to be captured are captured and that only authorized users have access to data.”
Know Your Customer
Part of that familiarity is the platforms and solutions that businesses are using before they decide to adopt a solution, as administrators and IT teams also need to be comfortable with the platform that is being used in order to prevent mistakes and ensure a smooth onboarding for everyone.
When it comes to preparing the customer for the onboarding process, Henkel said that service providers should know what technologies their customers are using at the time, adding that the ASC Technology solution has been integrated into Teams in part because of its popularity amongst businesses.
“Vendors should know what kind of technology is used by their customers and utilise it to make their solution accessible and easy to use instead of adding additional complexity.
“That’s a key reason why we have built our solution to run natively on Teams. When a financial institution, for example, decides to move on and implement such a solution, it is a huge step that usually takes months of planning.
“In the past, we would have had to know which servers the business is using in order to know what kind of technology to provide. Now they don’t need to think about these questions because they have all the technology already there in Office 365, they have the technology already in house that makes onboarding as quick as possible from a technical point of view.”
