As explored in Part 1 of our discussion about resiliency, a lack of continuous service often translates to a backlog of cases, end-user frustration, and more. Your ability to take care of your end-users in a timely fashion has a direct effect on customer retention and future revenue. That relationship is even more sensitive in mission-critical service cases.

So – what kind of service experience do you want for your end-users? How do you ensure your service model is resilient no matter what obstacles come your way? Here are some guiding principles, based on what we’ve seen in the industry:

• Build depth – and lots of it. Of course, this means you should hire as many of the brightest talents possible, and ensure those people enable strong, redundant coverage of key geographic areas. It also means you should build and use best-of-breed onboarding and ongoing training and professional development programs, so that your end-users get a consistently superior level of service no matter who shows up. A fully resilient service network and infrastructure should ideally have more resources than what’s required to ensure proper service.
• Your model should ensure coverage while also maintaining social distance. In other words, field engineers are more resilient if they’re based from their homes or other disparate places rather than from home or regional offices.
• The less and more efficiently your FEs can travel, the better. Also, the more control individual FEs have over their transportation, the more reliable their service will be. In most cases, this means giving them more travel options and lessening their dependence on a particular flight, train or other mass transit system.
• Eliminate backlogs and scenarios in which cases are prioritized. In most circumstances, attending to the first three items here should ensure you never get behind in servicing your end-users. But if that should happen for any reason, don’t allow tickets to stack up. Instead, find ways to get caught up as fast as possible and stay current.

Organizations that have done a good job with resiliency, and followed these principles, have an edge in customer service and are using that to create a competitive advantage. Resiliency equals business value, and end-users expect that from you now more than ever before.

For more information about Source’s outsourced service model, visit sourcesupport.com/services/24-7-support-services.

By: Jeff Nesler, Senior VP of Services Delivery