Heriberto’s ta-da story: taking the customer relationship to the next level with agility
The expertise of those who work for our company and their diverse professional backgrounds is the main reason why Orange Business is so resourceful. The wide skill set of our employees is what enables us to meet the expectations of our customers, right when they need it the most. We like to call it the “ta-da!” effect.
We, as customer support professionals, do three things: we assist, we advise and we anticipate.
"I joined Orange in 2007. I had a background in telecom infrastructure and in software programming. At Orange, I started out providing technical support on critical matters to global customers with a presence in Latin America. Today, I lead a team of around 70 people at our Brazil Major Service Center, with 12 people dedicated to one of our clients, a major automobile manufacturer. It’s an interesting role that requires the ability to understand and address customer concerns, requirements and issues."
The pandemic impacted our client just as it did us. Our challenge was to maintain an unaltered consistency in solutions provided during these times, while also building on our team’s capabilities.
"In recent times, we have seen a seismic shift towards more hybrid ways of working, accelerated by the current pandemic. This meant that we had to prepare our teams to deal with this fast pace of evolution and adapt the technical support we provide, to ensure high customer satisfaction, while our own support teams were working remotely. This was very evident for our own teams in Brazil working to assist our client. Our client, like us, was faced with a sudden push towards remote working due to the global pandemic.
"From a customer support point of view, this was new ground — how do you assist, advise and anticipate your client during this challenging time? On top of this, we had an additional local challenge to overcome in that our client’s Latin America teams needed localized support on a variety of security equipment from different vendors. To address this, we would need to quickly upskill our teams to be able to certify they could assist on these technology domains."
We worked hand-in-hand with our customer to ensure we were able to help and were fully-certified to provide support.
"For support to work well, it needed to be a full, global and engaged solution. The customer was made aware that our global teams were part of this solution and process, providing training where needed. This enables us to operate the same support structure at all our locations, distributed regionally and interacting globally to solve any issues around the clock. We are very interdependent, and this global relationship is critical in this regard. Our support team dedicated to our customer as a whole is based in India and manages their global connectivity requirements. But, of course, we also have some flexibility when it comes to regional needs, such as languages and time zone critical tasks. We, here in Brazil, specifically took on the customer's scope due to their additional regional requirements for security, phone and vendor issues. This immediately created the need for a tailored local skills development program, especially in connectivity, security and collaboration. We've created a training program enabling the upskilling of our support teams on different technologies, having over 30 people achieving more than 100 certifications from various vendors across various IT domains, from connectivity to security. This was combined with recurrent exchanges and learning sessions from customers' IT experts to link their business requirements to operational priorities and ensure the right level of attention to their multi-service needs."
It would not have been possible to take the customer relationship to the next level without the creativity, resourcefulness and hard work of the teams involved.
"With everyone on board now up to speed, we are able to take the customer relationship to the next level, as we understand their priorities and needs and have the skills and knowledge of their internal infrastructures. As a customer support professional, a job well done — one that we can be proud of — is one where we’ve achieved a structure that is wholly dedicated to serving the customer."
Customer satisfaction is not only rewarding, but is also the greatest metric for success that we have.
The “ta-da!” moment for the customer was the realization that our teams were now fully equipped to handle support requests for their specific technology applications.
"During a period of time when basically everyone was working in isolation, we managed to reinforce ties, contacts and skills more than ever before, all thanks to very clever use of the data and tech at our disposal. We received praise for our efficiency, sense of urgency and excellence of execution. None of this would have been possible, let alone imaginable, without the strong collaboration of our teams spread across the world. Teamwork is a solution in itself. Many people worked very hard around the clock to build something so that our customers could continue to receive the same high level of support, regardless of the changes happening around the world."
