The manner of carrying your customers near you is to bring yourself near your customers.
This foundational precept guides my technique as a customer support representative. It compels me to get my customers where they need to be in terms of client engagement and intimacy–even if, with some of them, I should get them there kicking and screaming.
Getting close to a patron enables us to live and breathe the realities, demanding situations, and aspirations of that consumer’s enterprise. In the case of Reliance Partners, a business insurance company that specializes in the transportation and logistics industry, they’ve become nearly an obsession. The 10-year-antique business enterprise has established itself in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Why Chattanooga? Well, it facilitates that Chattanooga, nicknamed “The Scenic City,” is a unique enough vicinity to live in that it’s the best locale ever to have been given the specific name of “The Best Town Ever” by way of Outside after it received Outside’s “Best Town” award twice. This is a plus; I hope to draw and preserve active personnel. Furthermore, the city’s entrepreneurial environment (which includes some of the arena’s quickest net speeds, clocking in at 10 gigabits) and downtown Innovation District have made Chattanooga a startup magnet.
However, the authentic point of being here for Reliance Partners is that it lets the business enterprise get into its “near the client” technique for customer support. Chattanooga is the coronary heart of Freight Alley—a heavily trafficked freight hall spanning the Atlanta-Birmingham-Chattanooga vicinity, with a few eighty of the state’s freight traveling via Chattanooga to its very last destination.
Beyond desire of place, Reliance Partners “strives in each way to obtain severe closeness via its know-how of and sensitivity to the needs of the transportation and logistics industry,” says Laura Ann Howell, the Reliance COO (who additionally proudly refers to herself as “Employee #11). Reliance’s achievement and growth, she says, are due to the fact “we understand trucking, we recognize freight, which allows us to head beyond surely presenting income and provider as if our customers simply operated in one in all several industries that we service interchangeably.” The Reliance leadership group is made out of former transportation industry executives and founders of trucking corporations, she tells me, “permitting us to empathize with the threat control challenges on this industry on a private degree–and to put in writing and service guidelines that address these dangers inside the way we’d want them addressed ourselves.”
Laura Ann Howell, COO, Reliance Partners: We would never have gotten to what we are without our clients’ agreements. Sellers taking on the mantle of a business accomplice with a single intention: to help our customers and their groups grow. Part of this understanding is that reaction time is vital to customer service. It is key for our clients. In addition to the knowledge that our customer service group can contribute to the transportation area, our crew is built on speed.
We consider that our clients have real-time problems, and we meet their desires by offering real-time solutions and advice. We are working to be the greenest, the most efficient. This is for operational excellence and so that our customers are serviced at pace. Technology lends its hand to our efforts right here. For instance, we needed a platform for fast scalability, and we located it via Nextiva. Particularly useful about the Nextiva platform is its embedded analytics, which is crucial to our attempt.
I suppose customers come back because they’ve benefited from our manner of doing business. In that case, we’ve received—which means we’ve supplied an irreplaceable revel in for our clients, whether they’re owner-operators or nationwide-degree providers.
As an upstart in a traditional enterprise, what else do you sense makes Reliance Partners exceptional?
Our inner tradition and view of personnel bring us to the cutting edge in a growing older industry. In a technique that is unusual inside the coverage industry, we’ve zeroed in on culture (a byproduct of range) as a defining characteristic of our logo. We are a corporation that uses the way of life and variety not as a quota but as a strategic benefit. With more than 20 nationalities represented, 18 languages spoken, 51 percent women, and an average age of 32, Reliance is notably one of a kind than our competition in a growing old industry like coverage. With the variety in history comes a range of notions, and we may be creative in our space to create an exceptional worker and purchaser experience when we promote innovation across all disciplines in our area.
What are some mistakes you spot groups (competition or even you!) making from time to time in serving or failing to serve clients?
Where loads of coverage companies fail is in mistaking customers for greenback symptoms in place of commercial enterprise companions, having an individual consciousness, in other words, on making income instead of developing relationships. This is an easy mistake, but any corporation can discover ways to do it correctly by taking up the mantle of an enterprise accomplice instead of just any other dealer. This technique may be transformational for each agency and the purchaser.
