The creation of First Contact team at Elite Group

Elite Group – The Creation of First Contact 

He explained about the concept of First Contact as a whole and how it originated from a Group-wide desire to achieve customer service excellence. 

“Given the nature of our business at Elite Group and the broad varieties of technologies we deliver and support, we introduced First Contact – both the concept and the team – to give our customers a first point of contact and a centralised landing ground should they ever need assistance – irrespective of what their issue may be.

This ensures we keep everything as simple as possible and underpins our objective of being a highly responsive and effective organisation for our customers whilst also guaranteeing that our skilled technicians can remain focused on task.

As we continue to strategically acquire other businesses – which remains part of our core strategy – I see First Contact becoming a critical component in bringing new operations into a consistent support format in our Group, so this is a really exciting prospect for us.

The purpose of our First Contact team can be summed up in one key objective which is giving our customers a truly great customer experience.  We achieve this by adopting a customer focused approach in everything we do, right from the point of receiving and acknowledging a support request through to the quality of updates we provide, how we set and meet expectations and how we ensure each and every one of our customers have a voice to influence positive change within our business.

At the same time, First Contact pays particular attention to working with our wider support teams, helping us to promote a culture of quality, communication and collaboration and this all feeds into delivering positive memorable experiences for all of our customers.

Elite Group’s customers are already seeing the benefits of our First Contact team.  Since we introduced the concept in September 2020, we’ve already made significant strides and seen huge benefits, not least of which is seeing us uniting our unified communications and mobile divisions.  Importantly this has allowed us to commence cross-skilling our expert agents so that our customers now have access to a wider range of skills within the team, making our support offering much more effective.  We have seen this translates into tangible increases in business performance and we are able to boast some of the most competitive handling times in our sector, which can only be great news for our customers.

In terms of giving an insight into the statistics for First Contact, I can talk all day pretty much!  Firstly, I am really pleased and immensely proud of our response times – the team is currently averaging an eight minutes average response time to all support requests.  This means that our customers are quickly acknowledged and they are engaged with and are allocated to the correct support team member quickly and efficiently.  Importantly, for any requests handled exclusively within First Contact, these events are resolved on average within four hours, so our customers can focus on their own tasks and not unnecessarily worrying about their technology.

We also boast a first-time fix rating across our organisation of 90%, which means the problem resolution or solution that we propose to any issue is, in nine times out of ten cases, the correct solution to get our customer back up and running.

Our customer satisfaction scoring is again very high at 95%.  This figure is based on and gathered from feedback across all our customer base for any support tickets raised, giving our customers a platform to convey honest feedback which we can utilise to help us promote positive change within our business.

Elite Group’s culture, ethos and the behaviours we demonstrate and encourage all contribute to the success of First Contact and positive customer experience overall.

I think importantly, First Contact as a whole has an amazing team spirit and camaraderie.  We all have clearly defined objectives and visibility of our performance against our goals.  The character types within the team are also naturally supportive people as well, and this is befitting of Elite’s culture and it means the work is shared and everyone absolutely brings value.

Of course, let’s not kid ourselves, it can be hard work from time to time, and the fact that, as we all know, technology can have its issues, but this is when the team being truly goal-focused comes to the fore.  We make sure that by working together as a team, we continue to exceed the expectations of our customers.

At Elite Group we are always searching for new talent to join our incredible team and I would say that for anyone who is considering a role within First Contact at Elite, if you are passionate about delivering exceptional customer service and if you enjoy working as part of an energetic and highly motivated team, First Contact is absolutely the ideal landing ground for you.  It can become an incredible platform for future career progression, you just need to speak to our apprentices.

Moving forward into the future, our focus within Elite Group’s First Contact team will be to continue to invest in the training and development of our people – helping them to expand their knowledge and skills so that they can support our customers to an ever-increasing standard.  We are an ambitious bunch within an ambitious organisation so this marries up very nicely.

We want to continue our partnership approach working closely with our customers to refine and improve the support we give them wherever possible.  This concept of improvement will be a continual theme as requirements, demand and technologies continue to evolve. ”

Elite Group is one of the UK’s leading unified communication providers, supplying reliable and professional IT and telecoms services to organisations seeking Business Mobile, Cloud, Networking, Connectivity, and Telephony solutions.  

For more information on how Elite Group can power your unified communication solutions, call us or request a quote today