Donal Hanrahan, Sales & Marketing Director of Magnet Telecoms

Technology at its worst can cause significant customer service headaches for businesses but at its best it can resolve them completely – at least that is the hope of telecoms provider Magnet Networks.

Many Irish businesses, especially in the telecoms and broadband sector, have not got the best customer service reputation. Far too often for consumers and clients interacting with their utility provider can mean premium phone calls, dodgy holding music and often belated and poor advice.

This process is only undertaken when the technology is at fault but with the right kind of support system in place, technology could increasingly negate the need for it at all;

“In the early days of broadband it was all about having a connection but now it’s about the quality of the service around that,” says Donal Hanrahan, director of corporate development at Magnet Neworks, which has developed its infrastructure to provide more than a simply linear service. “What we’re doing now is adding in value added services to compliment the central connection.”

There are a number of problems that plague the “traditional” customer service model at both residential and business levels.

For a start it is purely reactive – it requires the client to flag an error to the provider before they can even begin to diagnose and resolve it. On top of this solutions can be complex and difficult for customers to deploy remotely while following over-the-phone instructions; the only other option is to have an engineer sent out which adds to the amount of time the problem persists.

Magnet aims to solve, or at least minimise both of these issues for its business customers by remotely monitoring connections and repairing them directly when issues arise.

“We are now rolling out pro-active monitoring of connections for our business customers so if there’s a problem,” says Hanrahan. “Even if it’s just a small problem with their router or connection we can pro-actively detect it and deal with it quickly.”

In theory connection problems could occour and be fixed before the client has even noticed or reacted, while remote access means company requests for configuration changes can also be done by Magnet’s technicians directly.

“Traditionally a business would have to pick up the phone and call us but our aspiration is that they won’t have to do that any more”, says Hanrahan. “Today for most of our customers we are re-active but what we want to do is go behind the customer’s door to provide a better service.”

Even where the problem is not coming from Magnet the visibilty of the network means they can still point the client in the right direction, rather than simply telling them they did not know as may have had to happen before.

“There may be cases where a client’s computer has been infected with a virus and there are no changes we can make to remove that,” he says. “However if we can see that the problem is a virus we can advise them on how best to deal with it and point them to the solution, even if it isn’t ours.”

Beyond being more flexible in problem solving, Magnet is also making a push to become more visible to its customers, particularly those at residential level. It is currently in the process of establishing a customer interaction forum on popular discussion site Boards.ie, which according to Hanrahan will allow it to talk directly to customers and potential customers in a less formal way.

“We have a representative on boards.ie who can monitor what’s going on and respond to people with problems or give our side if we feel something isn’t being representated properly” he says. “We also hope to use the commercial area to put information up and if we solve a problem for one person on it then maybe the next person with the problem will stumble across the solution themselves.”

He conceeds that such a set up will only really be useful for residential users as businesses will be far more likely to pick up the phone if they have a query or problem, while home users might be inclined to ask around for help before doing so.

While the company is trying to interact with its customers via sites like Boards.ie, Hanrahan is less inclined to rush onto other platforms like Twitter and Facebook:

“I think what a lot of companies are doing is using them as marketing tools rather than for customer interaction,” he says. “The more options you can give to people to interact the better but I suspect people are going to get a bit peeved with every company having a Facebook page.

“I mean, would you become a friend of your broadband provider on Facebook?”

While Hanrahan is keen to stress the ways in which Magnet is adapting its support strucutres to make life easier for customers, he points out that the core focus of what customer service is in Ireland is backwards. The first step should not be about fixing a problem promptly and well, he says, it should about providing a service that is not going to cause people problems.

“For us the first step of customer service is about providing a good product,” he says. “If you provide a quality service then customer service is easy to follow up on.”

An edited version of this article was published in Business & Finance on the 21st May 2009.

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