Making meaningful changes
Customer service
At Colt, we're proud of our current NPS of 72 in Europe and the US and an all-time high 51 in Asia. It means we're doing what we set out to do. But there is always room to improve, and your feedback is essential to our understanding of how we can improve your experience as a customer.
Below you will see our 6 main principles of improvement, based off of your responses, to help build out a new customer journey.
When you work with us, it will be:
Easy
There is a single front door into Colt. You just need to say go and we'll get it done.
Personalised
Colt provides a suite of options that allow you to build what you need, when you need it.
Timely
Agreed timescales for interaction with us at every touch-point & every agreed deadline is delivered against without exception.
When you work with us, we will be:
Proactive
We don't just want to meet SLA's, we want to reach out and proactively solve problems as quickly as possible.
Professional
We know our stuff, & Colt is the place to go for guidance and advice on telecommunications worldwide.
Consistent
It does not matter who, where or how you interact with Colt it will feel as if you are speaking to the same person who knows and understands your business.
Improvements changelog
We're always listening for new ways to improve our services, and we're always using that insight to build a better experience. Below you will find a changelog of our recent developments and procedural changes that we have rolled out, or will be bringing live in the near future. If you wish to contribute feedback to inspire our next wave of changes, please let us know below.
Industry-leading customer service
We are proud to announce that we have been recognised at the European Contact Centre & Customer Service Awards as a Gold Winner for our customer experience and service delivery. And in 2021, we’re continuing to improve our services every day. Here are some of our major improvements this quarter:
Improving support visibility
We’ve revamped our support page on colt.net to help you find the information you need quicker and easier than ever before. Use our interactive support finder to get the team that is the most relevant to you and through your preferred contact method. Try our new page at https://www.colt.net/support/.
To continue to allow us to improve the service we offer you, when submitting your queries to the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team, please include your Customer Number (OCN) in the text’s body. This means we can specify our responses to your request and business and focus our ongoing improvements on what you really need when you need it.
Streamlining the Order Management experience
It is essential that your orders are always delivered on time and efficiently. Our order managers are key to progressing your orders through the delivery cycle. To enable us to keep improving the service they provide you, we’ve rolled out a ‘cockpit’ view, helping them easily identify orders with pending tasks. In addition, our new Jeopardy Management Tool provides clearer visibility of orders that are not progressing as we expect in real time to allow us to communicate any potential issues or roadblocks to you quicker.
Growing field expertise
When our teams are installing and testing your services, we want to ensure that they have all the information they need for the most efficient job.. We have developed a Field Experts App and are now undertaking a pilot before a managed rollout to support customer installations and maintenance activities. This App provides task information, real time updates and photographs. We will continue to add useful functionality to this App during 2021 to simplify how we manage field activities. We want to ensure that we deliver the right service the first time every time. We have also improved how we collect, understand and manage any quality issues by providing tooling integrated with our strategic Order Management System, enabling faster root cause analysis and issue resolution.
Improving our service knowledge
We know our teams must be experts and knowledgeable about your services and our wider industry. To enable our Service Delivery teams to have important and up to date information at their fingertips, we are in the process of designing and implementing an extensive Knowledge Library for quick access to vital information.
Making changes quicker
We’ve all experienced situations where you need to change your order once it’s been passed to delivery teams. In these times, it’s essential to avoid any delay to your order and minimize additional work for both you and us. We have been implementing changes to impact assessments with our Order Management System that provide consistent guidance to our delivery teams when changes are needed. As standard, we will continue to ensure that during our Sales conversations, we will avoid changes to your order as much as possible and will work side by side with you to ensure that your order meets all requirements before it reaches delivery.
Colt Online transformed:
We're excited to announce that thanks to customer feedback and extensive user testing, we’ve released a digital transformation of Colt Online’s user interface. This update helps solidify intuitive user journeys that make the portal easier to use than ever before:
- Our new look portal is fully responsive for desktop, mobile & tablet, giving you full access to the power of our customer portal wherever you are.
- We’ve restructured behind the scenes using new fast and reliable APIs for increased reliability and performance
- We’ve built a new menu experience, structuring items logically and making critical functions easier to find
- We’ve got entirely new Services, Ticketing & Invoicing systems, rebuilt from the ground up to help you manage your services easier than ever
- We’ve also made finding help and documentation more straightforward – keep an eye out for the new help widget with live chat assistance, new-look documentation site & useful links
Explaining invoices better:
We have added some documentation to colt.net to help you understand our invoices better, and to help you find the information you need. Note: If you are contracted with Colt for the provision of Revenue Share Services, you may receive a Self-Billed Invoice or an Outpayment Statement, which are explained in the link below: https://www.colt.net/invoice-format-explained/
Keeping you in the loop with planned works:
We’re expanding our planned works notifications to automatically include calendar invitations to your personal/public diary, helping you keep track of our upgrades easier. Once accepted, the schedule will help you effectively manage these works on your end as well as providing you with all the relevant information you may need.
Colt Online in Asia:
We’ve rolled out Colt Online to Asia, helping our customers provide more control over their Colt services and billing details. The new Order Management Portal, is designed to show order milestones, provide key information, and to give you self-service & contact management updates.
We have so far delivered the Order Management Portal for Ethernet P2P, Ethernet Hub & Spoke, Optical, Dedicated Cloud Access, SIP Trunking and Professional Services.
We have additionally made key billing documents available in Colt Online, including Invoices, Call data records, Universal number lists & credit notes. These documents will be available online and with the Payment status updated daily. The monthly invoices/CDRs/UNLs will be available on the 3rd business day of the month at 7:00 am.
Colt Online User Experience & Documentation:
We're undertaking a major overhaul of the user experience and performance improvement of our main customer portal. In our most recent roll-out in July, we've rebuilt our login pages, simplified our menu navigation and built a brand new portal home page. By October, we'll deliver new experiences in Ticketing, Services, Invoices & Planned Works. You'll also see developments in:
- Our Colt Online Documentation Site - We've listened to your feedback about finding online help for Colt Online difficult. We're in the process of redesigning our help site, with significantly improved search capability and easier contextual information. We will then be including multi language support at a later date.
- Video Support & Webinars - We regularly run Webinars on Colt Online and how to get the best out of it. To find out more about how to join one of these, visit Digital Event Centre - Colt Technology Services
- Colt Online now available in Asia - We recently launched Colt Online in Asia so you can now view your invoices online. We are currently working with you to get new accounts set up so you can take advantage of the platform. Read more about this in our announcement blog.
Improving Customer Experience
We've developed a centralised Leadtime repository that will be accessed by multiple teams within Colt to align and provide consistent Leadtime information for quoting and date setting
Updating Policies - Updating internal Date Management Policy giving harmonised guidelines on date management across Colt locations
Making things clearer - Updating templates, with system integration, to provide accurate and timely information at key order milestones
Delivering on time - Improved jeopardy management tools to highlight where delays will impact planned delivery tasks, and to prevent them jeopardising the on time delivery of services.
Network Operations : Incident & Problem Management
Increasing internal Quality checks - We've reviewed the process of internal quality checks and we are now checking more things in a more automated way, gaining more insight, meaning we can support you in a more meaningful way.
Communications & Invoicing
Manage your preferences - We are allowing you to manage how much you want to hear from us. We have implemented an "Unsubscribe" button, which allows you to decide to opt out if desired.
First invoice quality checks - For all new accounts we are checking with you the first invoice is as expected before it is formally sent, creating a smooth first time transaction.
New Communication Quality checks - We have set standards for how we will communicate with you, everything from style, to frequency is covered. We have introduced communication quality checks to make sure we are always working to the highest standards when interacting with you.
As the business impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic became clear we switched to sending all your invoices additionally by email as well as post. We want to make sure you receive invoices on time, especially if you are working with end customers. See our other Covid 19 changes here.
We'd love to hear your feedback
At Colt, we aim to be the most customer-oriented business in our industry, and we hope that you are finding that in all of the interactions you have with us. However, there's no such thing as a perfect experience, and there are always ways that we can improve.
We'd love to hear from you in the adjacent form for any ways we can improve our processes, help clarify things better, or deliver our services in a way that suits you more.
We don't allow the uploading of files to our website for security purposes, but if your feedback includes screenshots or attachments (which are more than welcome), please email us on our dedicated customer contact centres.
