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 carry my customers to wherein they need to be in phrases of client engagement and intimacy–even if, with some of them, I should get them there kicking and screaming.
To get close to a patron, it 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 inside the transportation and logistics industry, they’ve become this into nearly an obsession. For starters, 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 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 truly a plus while hoping to draw and preserve active personnel. Furthermore, the city’s entrepreneurial environment (which include some of the arena’s quickest net speeds, clocking in at 10 gigabits) and downtown Innovation District have made Chattanooga a startup magnet.
But the authentic point of being here for Reliance Partners is that it lets in the business enterprise to dive right into its “near the client” technique to 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 on its way 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 in which we’re without our clients’ agree with. Our sellers take on the mantle of a business accomplice with a single intention in mind: to help our customers and their groups grow. Part of this understands that one vital of customer service is reaction time. 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 take into account that our clients have actual-time problems, and we meet their desires by offering actual time solutions and advice. We are working to be the maximum green, the maximum most efficient. This is for operational excellence, but also 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, that’s crucial to our attempt.
If customers come returned yr after yr because they’ve benefited from our manner of doing commercial enterprise, then we’ve received—which means we’ve supplied an irreplaceable revel in for our clients, whether or not they’re owner-operators or countrywide-degree providers.
As an upstart in a traditional enterprise, what else, do you sense, makes Reliance Partners exceptional?
Our inner tradition and the view we take of personnel brings 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 greater than 20 nationalities represented, 18 languages spoken, 51 percentage woman and 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 notion, 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 different words, on making income as opposed to developing relationships. This is an easy mistake to make, but any corporation can discover ways to do it the right way: by using taking up the mantle of an enterprise accomplice as opposed to just any other dealer. This technique may be transformational for each the agency and the purchaser.
