Making the shift from reactive to proactive customer experience

Before, we would pick up service tickets and pass them between teams according to the complexity of the issue. Management only got involved if something went off the rails. It could take a long time.

The visibility gained from data dashboards enabled us to redefine our mode of operation so fires wouldn’t exist in the first place. We also created a new team we call the command center.

That team constantly monitors dashboards in real time. They might look at a ticket and see that a customer hasn’t been updated in two hours. They can intervene to see what is going on and make sure someone is going to communicate with the customer. We know that not keeping customers updated on the progress of a ticket is a point of friction. This allows us to not leave it to chance that the correct customer interaction and experience is going to happen.

Around the same time, we were implementing all these procedural and cultural changes, we were also implementing a proactive monitoring capability. We know when any service falls below threshold, and that creates an auto-event. An auto-event management ticket opens in the platform, which allows us to proactively troubleshoot.

Most of our ticket volume is now driven through those events. This means we’re now able to hunt for smoke instead of fire with any network issues. We can get in front of something, and the customer is never going to see or feel the degradation.

There was a certain resistance to change. We had some people who were seeing the inefficiencies occurring, but they felt invested in the status quo.

Initially, I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. But at one point, I started joking that if I heard that kind of pushback one more time, I was going to come in with my steel-toe boots and start to stomp. We are not here to protect footwear. We are here to deliver better experiences.