Being a Small Business: Part 2

One of the great things about being a small business is that you are never too far from your customers.

When we started our company, we committed ourselves to delivering the best possible customer service. Sounds like many small companies, doesn’t it? We knew we could make it by always focusing on the customer’s need. For IQ Services, it was the customer’s need to have confidence in the end-to-end performance of their contact center and communications business solutions. It seemed to come easy for us because of our collective experience in implementing telecommunications, contact center and IVR solution. We were naturally sympathetic to our customers. We’d walked in their shoes. We instinctively understood the need for a highly adaptable testing platform and related methods to meet very unique architectures, applications and business requirements.

But we also knew our customers needed to “see” our vigilance in action…not just hear the customer service spin. And because we’re a proud small company like so many others, they do get to “see” it.

Feedback from customers reaches all the people in the organization. We respond quickly to customer ideas and requests. And if someone in the company senses an issue or opportunity to make things better, we proactively make the change right then so our customer has the best experience we can possibly create for them.

When we sensed customers needed a flexible approach to test pricing and scheduling, we responded. We created customized pricing options to meet the unique technical, schedule and budget requirements of each customer. Incremental packaging and explicit re-test scope give customers control. Flexible scheduling practices 24 x7 with no up-charge give customers peace of mind.

When we saw the value of having everyone on the customer’s implementation team – including vendors – participate in the test real time, we immediately responded. We made it a part of our recommended testing practice.

When we saw how powerful it was to have recordings of all calls, we responded. We quickly added recording capabilities so customers could listen to each test call as it completed.

When we saw the power of providing on-line, real-time access to testing activity and results, we created tools and methods to provide customers with the visibility they needed to quickly identify and fix problems.

As we start our 14th official year as a successful small business, we continue to look for ways to improve our testing practices and customer service. For our company like so many other small businesses, it isn’t the size of the company, but the dedication and responsiveness of the staff that make us an ideal partner for companies of any size. Our ability to leverage technology doesn’t hurt either. We react quickly and make changes without the need to jump through management approval hoops. We give customers what they need when they need it.

Being a small business is a good thing. Working with one can be just as good…maybe better.

Jim Jenkins
http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Being a Small Business: Part 1

The other day, an Account Executive and I were talking with a prospect about testing their voice systems. The customer asked an interesting question. Why should my company do business with a small company like IQ Services? Of course, we’ve heard this question before and we have a response (which we’ll share in an upcoming blog post) that usually allays any concerns our prospects might have. But what I find most interesting about this question is that we – IQ Services employees and management alike – don’t think of ourselves as a small company. Yes, we fit the definition in terms of employee count and in terms of the many hats you get to wear when you work for a small company. But it doesn’t feel that way. It got me thinking about why.

Is it because so many of our customers are on the Fortune 500 list? Is it because we’ve served hundreds and hundreds of customers with communications technology that supports just a handful to hundreds of thousands of transactions per day? Or is it because we deliver services all over the world including North America, EMEA, CALA and Asia/Pacific? Is it because we are able to test with 20,000+ concurrent telephone calls or unlimited browsers? Or that we have distributed facilities for generating millions of monitoring transactions?

When I look at the ability of small (albeit talented and dedicated) group of people to so successfully leverage technology to do so much, I understand why we don’t feel small. I’m sure there are many other small businesses out there that feel the same way for similar reasons and more. When you couple this kind of success with the kind of unique responsiveness a small company can offer its customers, it makes you wonder why the prospects aren’t asking the bigger guys “Why should I do business with a big corporation like you?”
Mike Burke

http://www.iq-services.com/
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423

Test at the top of the stack™

Remember trays of Hollerith punchcards & clunk clunk clunk clunk card readers? Fortran?

Remember hearing (and saying) “…but I only changed one blessed card!?!”

Remember the lesson that came from that exercise?

You have to test the whole thing together, not just the pieces by themselves... that if the whole thing doesn’t work together, it doesn’t matter that the pieces individually are works of art.

Fast forward 40 years – to BUTT Sets, T-BERDs and unit testing. Then add RFC compliance, protocol testers, sniffers, network assessment, Nessus, nmap, nikto, PerfMon, et al – it is all very important and all very, very necessary. But not sufficient.

Why?

Because it’s all about whether or not your contact center solutions can be used the way you want them to be used under the traffic conditions you expect. Not just whether or not the servers respond to a ping or a traceroute, and your ports are provably secure from attack.

And the Users interact at the top of the stack, not somewhere down in the layers. The layers all have to happily interact with each other but in the end it’s about what happens when someone tries to use it, not just whether or not Tivoli or Performance Center show no red or amber alarms.

You need more than your technology’s inside-out view of the world to make sure your customers are being served. In this situation, the top-down view is the one that matters.

Test and monitor at the top of the stack and you’ll know how your customers are really being treated by your technology.

Mike Burke

IQ Services
6601 Lyndale Ave South, #330
Minneapolis, MN 55423
http://www.iq-services.com/