By Mike Herman, Managing Director of Client Support
From the inception of Abacus a decade ago, we made a commitment that, above all, service was going to be a differentiator for us in the market place. I’m pleased to report that 10 years later, this is still the primary goal and focus of our organization.
As we’ve scaled throughout the years, we’ve seen firsthand the challenges of keeping our staff engaged and invested in our clients and company. To that effect, we prioritize the solicitation of feedback from our clients, as well as our internal staff, to look for opportunities to scale our vision to deliver the best client experience possible.
Some of the methods we use to collect feedback include client surveys, support ticket reviews by our client services managers, Abacus employee performance reviews, in-person review meetings by our account management team at client offices and a Net Promoter Score (NPS) we ask clients to rank us on each quarter.
In particular, we made a concerted push this past year to increase the awareness of client surveys, which are made available via a link at the end of every closed helpdesk ticket. These surveys provide valuable information and referenceable examples of what did, or did not, go well.
In order to incentivize client users to participate in these important short 5-question surveys, we held a contest to give away an iPad during each half of 2017. As a result, we were able to increase the amount of helpdesk ticket surveys submitted by client users from less than 100 over the last few years to over 1000 submitted surveys during 2017! This means a lot more feedback gathered to ensure we can constantly improve upon our service delivery model.
Heads-up clients: the survey contest continues in 2018 – we’ll be awarding an Apple Watch 3 to two lucky client users this year, so be sure to fill out your helpdesk ticket surveys to qualify, and in the process help us deliver superior client service!
An example of service improvements implemented this past year resulting from client feedback was a significant investment made in upgrading our helpdesk phone system, allowing us to leverage best in class call center technology to enhance our service capabilities. The new system we implemented has allowed us to increase efficiencies across our global support teams located in geographically diverse regions and provide our clients with an expedited, higher level of service.
The upgrade has enabled us to create a queue for our techs and clients to ensure that client calls are answered by our expert staff as quickly as possible. In the past, if we didn’t answer quickly enough, client calls would be routed to our overflow answering system which would then create a ticket on their behalf. We heard loud and clear from clients via our ticket surveys that they found this system confusing and inefficient. By cutting out the middle man and using this technology upgrade as a way to connect available resources with clients, we’ve been able to reduce overflow calls going into our answering service to on average less than one a week!
In other exciting news, the Abacus global presence keeps on growing. We are happy to announce that our London-based team has grown to 9 and we just moved into a new, larger location in the West End. Our new London office space was built to accommodate a much larger team than we currently employ as we’re anticipating steady growth in this region. Led by our Director-Europe, Tom Cole, the team consists of many seasoned veterans from the UK fintech and hedge fund world. Read more about their expertise and our growth in the UK market in our recent press release.
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Founded in 2008, Abacus Group is an innovative, award-winning IT and Cybersecurity managed service provider offering an enterprise integrated platform specifically designed for the unique needs of the financial services industry.
