Cisco Customer Kings

Conosco win coverted Real Business Magazine's Customer Kings Award

Read the full story in Real Business magazine or watch the vodcast with Ben Gladstone, Conosco CEO.

Entrepreneurs love to say the customer is king. But do they mean it? When pushed, can they produce cold, hard evidence of their slavish devotion to the monarch? Real Business and Cisco decided to find out who really deserves the epithet, Customer King.

They wanted to discover who goes the extra mile to create a truly memorable customer experience.  They looked for innovation, ingenuity and imagination in the entries and, above all, they wanted to see concrete proof that the techniques resulted in improved customer engagement.  We won. 

Click the link above to hear Ben Gladstone, Conosco's CEO, talk about how we developed the systems that made us Real Business Magazines Customer Kings, or visit Real Business's website to read about why we won.

The Real Business Magazine Article:

It takes a brave soul to admit he's wrong. Ben Gladstone is the co-founder of Conosco, which provides outsourced IT support to small and mid-sized firms in London. Last year, he took a long hard look at the way Conosco was delivering customer support and concluded an improvement was needed sharpish.

"Customers weren't getting the best possible service. The same problems were recurring, causing unnecessary downtime and we weren't doing anything systematic or rigorous to prevent them. We were also failing to make customers' systems really meet their needs - we were guessing what their employees and businesses needed, instead of questioning and listening to them."

He examined the processes of the large corporates, studied the government's ITIL best practice guides and talked to his employees, encouraging them to come up with a four-step overhaul.

The first step was a CRM system. "The most direct channel is to ask for feedback when we fix a problem - and to act on it. We customised our NetSuite CRM system to include a feedback form with every case closed. If the feedback is bad, we call the customer straight back, find out the complaint and resolve it.

"Next, we worked on preventing problems and downtime. We use low feedback scores from closed cases to change the way we do things and correct poor setups. We have a range of remote management tools adapted from large enterprises to audit each computer every day and detect and fix any early warnings or actual problems before they affect our customers. We also promoted a support team leader in charge of monitoring the closed cases to find patterns of repetitive faults that might signify a deeper problem."

The third step was to chat to clients. Instead of talking solely about problems, Conosco now issues "IT wishlists", so clients can discuss what technology could be doing for them.

"The final channel - for now - is to make our systems meet the needs of our customers' businesses. Again, we used to talk to our main contacts but we were missing things, so we've created formal strategic reviews, with templated questionnaires, where we ask about their future business plans, growth, changes, etc. From this information, and our analysis of their systems performance, we can draw up a technical roadmap and budget."

Did the review work? "New business from referrals has doubled, contributing to our growth of 36 per cent last year. Since then, our customer relations are such that we're holding onto clients even in the face of recent cut-throat underbidding by our competitors. Probably related to these improved relationships, our employees are staying much longer - which further improves our service."

Mission accomplished.