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If you missed our fireside chat with Sangoma Technologies Corporation, we’ve got the highlights for you. In August, our VP of Customer Success, Reagan Nickl, was joined by Joel Kappes, Chief Customer Officer at Sangoma, to discuss the success Sangoma has found while working with AskNicely.
Joel and Reagan set the stage for the fireside chat by introducing Sangoma. “We deliver essential communication services to businesses,” said Joel. Sangoma is a trusted leader in business communications, offering on-premises, cloud, and hybrid unified communications as a service solutions, or UCaaS. They do this by combining voice, video, networking, and security to create integrated experiences for their customers.
Sangoma has been an AskNicely customer for over a year, and they’ve made major strides in areas they were looking to improve. “Over the last 11 years, we have acquired 11 companies, and there was just a lot of work to do in the back office to stitch all of that together,” Joel explained.
Watch the full fireside chat here.
Sangoma started using AskNicely to create more consistency between all of the businesses they had acquired, halt churn, and create a culture of customer experience excellence.
One of the most important things a business looking to create the changes Sangoma did is to “just start,” Joel said. It can be daunting to feel like you must have a perfect plan before diving in, but it can be far more beneficial to just begin and adjust as you go.
“Take the good, take the bad, and just start, and course correct. Sometimes you're going to be up and down… but as you start to work on it, you're going to figure it out, refine your processes, and find out the focus areas where you need to be spending time,” he said.
Sangoma started using AskNicely after they realized it was time to find out what their customers really thought about them, Joel said. After implementing AskNicely they started using Net Promoter Score to see what their customers really thought them. Joels advice after doing so? Don’t be afraid to measure and measure consistently. “If you don't measure it, you don't know where you need to do better, and you'll never fix anything,” said Joel. Using NPS has help Sangoma’s leadership confirm suspicions they had about where they could improve, resulting in a more than 30-point increase in NPS.
It’s unrealistic to have an eye on every single customer interaction at a business the size of Sangoma. But you also don’t need to. “People always surprise you, right? We’ve empowered them to do the right thing, do what’s right for the customer,” Joel said.
“You're not always going get it right. Sometimes you're going to make a bad call. But [it’s about] empowering people to just make decisions and do the right thing,” said Joel.
Sangoma created a customer-obsessed culture where everyone is involved in improving the customer experience. They did so by empowering their teams, equipping them to make decisions, and aligning the entire organization to a single, high standard of service excellence.
“That becomes infectious within the company, and that’s kind of where Sangoma’s at right now. People can feel it in the air — like, ‘Hey, we’ve got our swagger back a little bit,’” Joel said.
Despite all of those improvements Sangoma has been able to make in such a short amount of time, Joel recognizes that there’s still room for improvement. With AskNicely’s help, and features like shoutouts, dynamic surveys, and more, there’s so much opportunity for Sangoma to continue their culture shift.
“Are we where we need to be? Absolutely not. We've probably only use a quarter to half of the capabilities of this platform,” Joel said.
The end goal, as Joel sees it, is to deliver best-in-class customer experiences, “I want us to deliver customer experience that is a differentiator in the marketplace. There are a lot of people who do what we do. It's all the same stuff for the most part…. what really will differentiate us, at least in our space, is that service wrapper.”
At AskNicely, we’re ready to help Joel and his team reach those goals.
“If we can get to the place where we clearly have the secret sauce from a service and operational perspective that outshines our competitors; that's where we want to be,” Joel said.
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo today.
