Good customer service isn’t an accident. It’s got to be part of your approach from day one. This means close alignment with key customers, asking the tricky question constantly – what can we do better? To get an honest answer to that curly question you need to be regular contact with customers so they feel like they have ‘skin in the game’.

Here’s how we do it.

Aggregator Partners – regular review meetings where we ask honest questions and more and then listen to feedback. We discuss options prior to designing and developing the solutions our partners are requesting. And certainly before any direct implementation with the broker channel. What this gives us is a top-level idea of where our customers want to head and what they want to achieve. We don't just go off and interpret this into what we think our partners want and need.

Instead, the next step is the crucial component of our results. Key initiatives need an advisory board or highly engaged top-level users of Salestrekker across a broad range of aggregators and in different geographic locations. We've found customer and broker behaviour differs in different locations and we need to support this. Then we roll out our planned strategy of review meetings, software development and review processes. All feedback is integrated into our software development program.

Focusing on key performance indicators – this is the second phase of our strategy and includes a mix of the simple and easily achievable and the more complicated. A great example here is when we launched, we wanted to answer customer queries within 20 seconds via our helpdesk. We've sustained our focus on this commitment, and now we have a 14-second waiting time.

It's exceptionally important because no one wants to wait in general, and no one really wants to wait when they really need help. It might take us longer to resolve queries based on their complexity but here again we’ve strengthened our commitment to resolving problems. We’ve matched our help desk hours to the typical hours a broker works here in Australia. That’s from 6am – 10pm during the week and 8am to 3pm on Saturdays. Being available during those high-stress times delivers the customer service levels brokers need, and this is reflected in the feedback about high levels of customer satisfaction.