Three: Bringing quality care to customers
The spine of an outstanding service is the support you offer every step of the way to customers, and Three Ireland’s Business Customer Care has been going from strength to strength
Customer loyalty and retention are important for any business to achieve. It’s not enough to just sell a product; you need to provide quality service throughout the customers’ lifetime with you.
Three Ireland’s Business Care has been doing this for decades and has the accolades to back itself up. It boasts a right first time score of
85 per cent, and it’s the number one operator from its latest CX360 scores through Behaviour and Attitudes research. Also, it’s number one for NPS for the last eight quarters.
It has received awards at the Irish Customer Contact Management Awards, recently receiving the Best Customer Shared Services Contact Centre of the Year in 2023 and Best Customer Experience for three years in a row.
Recent ComReg stats show that Three Ireland is the least complained about telco operator, with a score of 0.4 complaints per 100,000 subscribers in Q4 2023, below the industry average of 0.7.
None of this happens by accident; it’s the result of constantly designing new processes and refining existing ones to ensure its service is always high-quality. The customer care you receive all the way through the contract is the same as when you sign up on day one, said Brenda Jones, head of business service for Ireland and the UK.
“It’s a key company focus,” she explained. “It’s a huge part of our proposition, and it’s very important to our customers.
“We’re constantly listening to what our customers tell us, and that’s how we achieve CX; you listen to the customers ’point of view, walk in their shoes through the journey and make it better. We want people who do business with us to find it easy and to stay with us.”
Walk in their shoes through the journey and make it better
Three Ireland has multiple channels for customer contact, from retail, digital, calling and messaging. Each channel is treated seriously, and all channels are treated equally.
“We don’t dictate the channel the customer chooses ” she added. “The reason we evolved all those channels is to give customers choice and speed, so for instance, a lot of digital channels are used out of hours by customers, or while they’re multitasking or doing something else. It’s to give choice and flexibility to the customer, you do what suits you.”
The key part is that the company never assumes that everything works perfectly; there is always room for improvement.
“Even with the best will in the world, there will be things that don’t work as smoothly as planned, mentioned Jones. “We make no assumptions; we always ask the customers what they would like and equally ask our employees what they’re seeing, what customers are telling them and what they need to do their job better. It’s two-fold.”
Likewise, when the company receives good feedback, it champions those elements for employees who deliver it.
An essential element of this is its care team, which has an average tenure of 15 years. Based in Limerick for over 25 years, it’s developed a strong reputation for high-quality support, designed and cultivated over time.
It has an expert in-house technical service desk onsite in Limerick that protects businesses around the clock. It also includes full incident management using an ITIL framework and offers 24/7 support as an option for businesses.
In addition to loyalty and dedication in the work done, it’s just as much down to training and development to ensure people are upskilled and can move into specialist areas like ICT and IoT.
“You build knowledge the longer you’re here, and we focus on training and developing specialists for different products,” she said.
“That’s very important, particularly in our ICT or IoT portfolio, as you need specialist support, and we make sure you get that as we build up new products and services.”
“It’s not as easy to do it the first time because it’s a more complex query, but we do get faster because of the training and the skills we have with all the staff supporting those products.”
Three Ireland’s approach to providing care and support to its customers is vital to its offering and is all about adding value. The approach is always proactive, helping customers with its products and services and offering the things that will help them based on their current situation.
It’s not just about meeting customers ’needs; it’s about ensuring they get the maximum value from their experience and leave knowing more than before.
“Once we get to know your business, we look at what we can do to help improve it, and we won’t discuss or waste your time on products that won’t do what you need them to do.”
“What we’re always trying to get to is adding value and not just answering a general query. Every call adds value and tells you something you mightn’t have known before you rang. People will often ring with a general query, but we’ll also tell you something important that you didn’t think you needed to know before you rang us.”
“It’s not about sales; the in-life is so important, and we see that as equal as when we sign up your business.”
Visit three.ie/business for more information.
