Follow the Sun: How floLIVE Makes Customer Success Part of the Package

“floLIVE sets the bar for how organizations SHOULD provide support for their customers. You get a strong sense that you are the most important and urgent task on their plate for the day. I don’t think these people sleep though… you gotta give them some rest time!” Senior Portfolio Leader, Fleet Management Enterprise. 

It’s reviews like this one that keep our CSAT scores at 4.88 for our internal ticketing system. (And we promise, all of our support engineers are given their requisite 8 hours!) But, how do we make these reviews happen? On the face of it, we check all the necessary boxes – 365/24/7 availability, service with a smile, a robust feedback loop to keep improving and iterating the way we manage support and success. 

However, after 6 years with floLIVE, I can truly say that it’s our philosophies under the hood where we take it to the next level. 

Trust in Technical Expertise

Every device is different. It may be provided by a different manufacturer, access a different technology, or have a different use case attached. The battery life, the bandwidth, network events, connections… Our support teams need an in-depth understanding of each customer and their business model, and how to make their devices and capabilities work best for them. When a new use case comes along, it’s up to us to do the background work to make sure our team is certified and ready to hit the ground running, and that our services will work seamlessly with any new customer and approach. 

Understanding the technology also means having a deep understanding of how devices behave in different environments. For example when a device is only active for a very short time, during which it has to find the network, register and send/receive data to the cloud application. Such devices are sometimes up for a few seconds a day! These cases are often fixed by configurations in the network and on the SIM.

One Size Fits All? Not Always

At any stage of the lifecycle, we always sit with customers to understand their needs, whether they are onboarding, maintaining or scaling solutions. Many companies offer a one-size-fits-all solution, whether that’s the platform itself, or when considering support or control. At floLIVE, across the whole customer journey, we start from scratch with a problem and think about the specific customer and their requirements. We discuss their product, their use-case, their requirements and any limitations, and based on this analysis – we define the optimal connectivity solution for that customer. Moving forward, at floLIVE the customer portal allows customers to fully self-support their business and take control over their connectivity on their own terms, and that’s really powerful once customers realize how much they can do with a flexible infrastructure in place. 

For example, a multi-IMSI solution can reduce latency and costs, while making it happen through one vendor and one SKU can slash the complexity, too. We are always happy to work with the customer on custom set-ups based on their context and experience..

Customer Success as the Face of floLIVE 

We never forget that we are a customer’s first port of call, and that we are responsible for setting the customer expectations from end-to-end. Customer Experience is our “sun”. We start every investigation from the core network, working with the provider or operator where necessary, delving into the device or the SIM if the clues lead us there.  While most Support teams can only check one element, because we own the whole tech stack and have the relationships with the operators, we have a complete view and direct access to every element of the connectivity ecosystem.

It’s the personal approach that makes us strong. As we have an understanding of each customer and their use case, we are never starting from a blank page. My team has years of experience and extensive training, and they always work collaboratively in service of the customer.

For example, one of our customers is a module maker that needed to optimize battery consumption for its devices. To make this happen, we exposed an interface that allowed the modem to control all the connectivity-related aspects on the SIM itself. This could only happen because we own the whole connectivity stack, and can pass on these benefits to our customers. 

Embracing Four Pillars

I always say to my team, we stand by four clear pillars of customer support and success. 

First up, we educate our customers through onboarding services and then ongoing support tools. Customer support doesn’t end after onboarding, customers need on-going education to make their solution deployments more accurate, achieve their goals more rapidly,  and to make their day jobs easier.

We want customers to be autonomous with the service they receive, and so #2 is that we empower the users to take advantage of all products and services, and self-serve their connectivity via the portal. This provides operational efficiencies that customers have been seeking for many years and is augmented by our hands-on troubleshooting when it’s needed.  If there is a problem, we take responsibility to resolve the issue, so that customers never feel like they are lost or unsupported.

The third pillar is that we advocate for our customers if processes could be improved. We’ve had experiences where we saw costs could be reduced, and it’s part of the job to approach the customer and show them how they could save money each month. One ongoing example of this approach is that we only charge for active devices, recognizing that a business isn’t generating value until devices are active. Why should they pay before that happens? 

Of course, we’re always open to iteration, so our final pillar is a continual refinement to improve the customer experience. Our door is always open to hear what we could do better. Feel free to reach out to me directly with any questions or concerns – I’d love to hear from you. 

In the meantime, if you want to see how floLIVE works for yourself, and get a walkthrough of our connectivity management platform, schedule your demo here.