What’s the best customer service experience you’ve ever had?
Most people have to think long and hard to answer that question- not because they have so many great experiences to choose from, but unfortunately because they have too few. Unremarkable customer service has become far too common in business today. Todd, Keith, and Archie founded PSS in the summer of 2002 because they were passionate about taking care of customers. They believed most enterprise call center customers would welcome a higher level of service for the support and maintenance of their IVR infrastructure.
Customer Service Fanatics
The former Periphonics (and then Nortel) executives had years of experience helping customers keep their IVR systems running efficiently. They recognized that when enterprises serviced their own customers the call center was often the most critical end customer touch point. The IVR often provided the critical first impression as an entry point to the call center, so reliable operation of the IVR system was essential to customer service delivery for many enterprises. If anything went wrong with their IVR system, customers would call PSS and receive a remarkable level of service.
Without a doubt, it was risky for any Fortune 500 company to rely on a three-person startup to maintain and support one of their most critical customer touchpoints. Early PSS customers accepted that risk because they trusted the founders. They knew customer service was in Todd, Keith, and Archie’s DNA, and believed the trio would stop at nothing until any system problem was solved.
Zero to Inc. 500 on Word of Mouth
Within five years PSS had grown to over 50 employees and was recognized by Inc. Magazine and Entrepreneur Magazine as one of the fastest growing private companies in America. The founders successfully replicated their culture of extreme customer service, and by 2007 had ongoing service agreements and deep relationships with nearly 100 customers.
It turns out that you learn quite a lot about a customer when you’re supporting them. You get to know their systems, applications, and interfaces inside and out. You learn what each customer is trying to achieve with those systems and what’s most important to them. So when a customer asks for advice, you’re generally in a good position to provide good perspective and value.
Support Leads to Professional Services
It wasn’t long before existing customers began to ask for a broader array of services, and a stream of professional services projects grew from the original PSS support and maintenance business. PSS began to help customers transition to new IVR systems and applications, and soon provided turnkey IVR and CTI solutions with the same high level of ongoing support PSS customers grew to expect. PSS greatly expanded its professional services team through three acquisitions in ’07 and ‘08: an IVR solutions company, a CTI solutions company, and a user interface design company.
Our strong professional services organization combined with our deeply established support operations and customer service culture make PSS different from other vendors in our space:
- We focus on the entire lifecycle of your system deployment, not just the first 10% that falls between kickoff and cutover. We give proper attention to “the other 90%” of the lifecycle to help make sure you get the returns you expected.
- Project-centric vendors are motivated to have you transition to next-generation infrastructure as much and as quickly as possible. The focus on “the other 90%” keeps PSS very relationship-centric, so we can help you transition gracefully to next-generation call center infrastructure at a pace that’s as fast or slow as your business priorities demand.
What's Next for PSS?
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