What lessons should be learned by the UK business sector following the recent spate of storms?

With the ever-growing number of services that are hosted in the cloud, one of the main lessons is the importance of not only deploying business grade connectivity that comes with an independent 24/7 monitoring service attached to it, but that you need to carefully select your supplier to ensure that you receive the level of support and communication that you’re after. Your provider may not be able to change the weather and prevent Storm Eunice, but they should be able to proactively notify you of any outages, keep you updated as to when service can be restarted and recommend temporary solutions in the meantime. In short, they need to provide you with a high level of customer service.

Connectivity is now mission critical for British businesses, not only at HQ and office level, but also for the vast number of remote workers as in many cases if connections break, companies can start losing money immediately.

The problem of poor customer service was brought into prominence during the pandemic when many of us experienced Interactive Voice Response phone systems with long menus and an explanation that “due to the current situation the company is experiencing a high call load and we would ask you to be patient” only to be put through to someone who seemed unconnected with their colleagues and unable to help with our enquiry. In some cases, this is still the situation nearly two years later and it is not acceptable. Companies have had more than enough time to adapt to flexible working and the technology to allow staff to continue to work effectively in a new hybrid environment is readily available and affordable.

We read of and experience companies removing meaningful telephone numbers from websites and confronting their customers with a list of FAQs that may or may not adequately answer a query, this is also not acceptable. Whilst Live Chat and SMS contact certainly have their place, in our experience there is nothing better than being able to communicate with a named member of staff and being able to do so via the phone.

At V12 we have made significant investments in our monitoring and customer service technologies to allow us to constantly oversee multiple products and services from our wide range of best-in-class suppliers. We have over twenty years’ experience of providing business grade connectivity and voice services to the UK business sector; our phones are always answered by friendly humans and not by voicemail and if this sounds like the sort of company you’d like to work with, then please get in touch…