Wednesday, January 27, 2010

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

No comments:

Post a Comment