Guest Blog: How VSN achieved the best customer support service

Question: What are the keys to get the best customer support service? 

Javier Encinas: If I had to choose just one key for customer service, I’ll say the main key is the human team. We need a very professional and committed team with customer success, like the one we have. Of course, we also need to give them the right tools. 

There are also secondary tools to get the best customer support service, for example, having an excellent and very well-defined attention policy. But the team is the key element. 

Q: How is your daily routine in the customer service department? 

J.E: There is no routine in customer support. Every day is different. We need to differentiate between the operative side and the commercial in charge of post-sale service. On the operative side, we have two customer service team leaders: one for the morning shift and one for the night shift. They meet daily with their team and one another to hand over the different tickets that are open. In this meeting, they check every new ticket and if there is any critical or big issue that requires that they need to be solved urgently. 

I personally meet separately with each shift leader weekly and on Friday we usually meet all together to address any need that they have, to escalate any issue or to know if there is a ticket that depends on a provider and needs my attention.   

On the commercial side, we work together with the administration team to renew all the contracts. Is a more administrative work, we manage each account and control the different contracts that we have. 

Q: How do you communicate with the client? Which channels do you use? 

J.E: As in the previous question, we have the operational side and the commercial part. On the first one, we used to have a variety of channels to communicate and synchronize with the client: via Skype, phone, Microsoft Teams, etc. 

Now everything is centralized through the mail and our Team Support tool, which is the ticketing system that we use. The main reason for that is accountability: We need to register every communication to track everything and know when a ticket has been answered or solved and extract statistics and business intelligence. This is key for scaling up our support service and achieve the best customer support service possible. 

On the commercial side, maybe we neglected the communications a little bit. Of course, there are communications with clients, and our sales team is always in touch with their accounts, which is essential. But on the post-sales side, we used to get the insight using surveys, but we don’t currently have a customer journey. We are working and focused on that, and we are starting to shape it to find the ideal steps to contact our customers. 

Q: You’ve recently updated the customer support portal? What is the new tool and what are its benefits? 

J.E: The new tool is our Team Support portal. We have many new functionalities that we didn’t have before. One of the key elements is that it enables us to centralize all the communications of customer service, so every action is registered there. You have the time records and having this data improves our efficiency. I can tell many useful statistics like time response or open ticket time. We can manage the ticket lifecycle really well from here. 

Another of the big advantages for customer support is the integration with our CRM, Salesforce. Salesforce recently bought the Team Support company, so they are working hard to integrate both solutions and that will be great for us in terms of customer journey, automation and having all the information of each account, both on the operational and the post sales side. 

Q: How was the transition to this portal? What do the clients think about it? 

J.E: As with any change, we had some inefficiencies and problems. For example, we had trouble with the arrival of the mail communications of the new customer service portal on the spam folder. That costs us a lot of noise, as clients came back to us saying “You didn’t reply to our ticket” but we did, and the answer was on the spam folder.  

Minor mistakes happen in these transitions, but in general, I believe it is a great tool. Each customer has its own hub or website where they can see, manage, and open new tickets. They can communicate through email or through the tool and it’s a step forward for our clients. 

Q: In the industry surveys, VSN is always in the top position as a company easy to work with and recognized with one of the best customer support services. Which are the keys for this?  

J.E: Our team is the key. We have a very professional team and that reflects in the rest of the work. We are really close to the client. We have a great response time. We usually get back to the customers in less than 15 minutes. We are also very flexible. We are good at adapting our roadmap, there are many features that we don’t have, and that feedback goes from the support team to our development team. Therefore, we try to adapt our roadmap to what the industry is demanding. It’s not just a service, it’s a key to adapting our solutions in the right direction. 

Q: Finally, what are the future challenges for Customer Support at VSN?  

J.E: We must scale up the customer department to the company’s growth. We are in the process of doing so, so we have some job openings. If you know anyone who wants to become the next VSN’s support engineer, please, send us their resume. We also need to professionalize and automatize the day-to-day operations of the contractual part of support, because it is a very demanding operation. If we solve this, we will have better management and we’ll be able to focus on the key elements of customer support.