Company: Network Alliance, Inc., Reston, VA
Entry Submitted By: RMR & Associates
Company Description: Network Alliance, Inc. (Network Alliance) delivers high-quality, dependable, and cost-effective solutions for organizations’ IT management needs. Network Alliance provides a hosted desktop service for a complete IT solution for small and medium-sized businesses, and allows clients to access their desktop and business applications from anywhere/anytime.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Front-Line Customer Service Team of the Year - Technology Industries

Nomination Title: Network Alliance's Front Line Team - Clients' Best Support and Defense

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

In any business, the team you have assembled to support your front line is essential to retaining and building deeper relationships with your customers. In Network Alliance’s case this is the most critical element to their businesses. Fully supporting their clients’ telecom and IT services, Network Alliance is responsible for providing services for their small business clients’ most mission critical technology needs. Often not technical experts themselves, having a team that can ensure their businesses are staying up and running, can easily get in touch and be provided with immediate guidance in cases where challenges come up is a dynamic value-add that Network Alliance delivers to their clients on a daily basis and is what has been a main contributor towards the Company’s success. It’s been Network Alliance’s mission to make IT simple and make it fun and enjoyable for its clients. Network Alliance helps people and small organizations benefit and enjoy technology as much as they do.

As the customer base has grown and the range of Network Alliance’s IT solutions has become more complex the support team is charged with maintaining an exceptional track record of customer satisfaction. Behind the scenes, tech specialists in the level IV data center are proactively monitoring, upgrading, managing and responding to system alerts 24x7. Led by Josh Strahler, the support team provides high-touch, personalized IT support vs. general product support. The team of ten manages about 20,000+ IT support requests per year and is broken into 3 Tiers to allow the team to immediately respond to issues and enable escalated situations to be handled in a timely manner. Under Strahler’s supervision, the Tier 1 team is the client’s first point of contact, when an issue arises. Chris Anderson works with clients to resolve issues that can be handled in 10 minutes or less prior to being sent to the Tier 2 team. Due to Chris’ ability to work with clients and get issues resolved quickly, 91% of Network Alliance’s ticket issues are resolved at Tier 1 in under than 10 minutes. In cases where, issues do need to move on to Tier 2, they are often resolved within 48 hours or less and managed by Andrew Morgan. This year alone Josh and his team have ensured that:

• All phone calls are picked up by a live representative;
• Response times in 2014 averaged 60 seconds per call down from 90 in 2013; and
• That the team responds to inbound emails within two hours.

Network Alliance’s is focused on transparency. Their support performance is shared openly with customers and prospects. In fact, a running tally of customer satisfaction scores and direct customer feedback is posted in real time, front and center on the company’s home page, www.networkalliance.com. Additionally, Network Alliance is always looking for ways to improve their client support services and response times. At the end of each support call, customers receive a survey to rate their experience on five aspects: communication, courtesy, knowledge, timeliness and overall satisfaction.

A key initiative that was underway in 2014 was developing an overall customized dashboard for the support and management team to use to analyze key performance indicators. This dashboard is accessible to the entire team and enables the team to be able to micro strategies where they are and how to manage the volume of tickets and issues. The dashboard also allows the team to eliminate errors, see data in real-time, see targeted matrix, a high-level of all the moving parts of the troubleshooting process and enables them to integrate with other Network Alliance systems. Giving the team a centralized system, where all the data can be housed and analyzed in one place, has significantly freed up the team’s time and has played a contributing role in Network Alliance’s improved client satisfaction rating, increasing from 91% to 96% percent in 2014, and why they have maintained a 98% customer retention rate, year over year.

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