Profiting from Customer Satisfaction: How Acer Leads with Support
In a perfect world, things do not break. They work as intended out of the box and continue to deliver for years until they retire into obsolescence. But in the real world, things go wrong—and when they do, Acer Africa's support team is there to help.
Many brands offer support services, but not all of those are equal. All too often, a support query is tedious, with agents quoting scripts and customers repeating their issues to every new person they liaise with.
Yet the support centre is often the frontline where a business truly meets its customers; how they are treated has a massive impact on their loyalty to a brand. As they say, you find out who your friends are when things get tough.
"Nobody contacts a support centre because they're happy; they do it because they've got a problem," says Francois van Zyl, Acer Africa's Call Centre Manager. "In support, you represent a relationship, not just a solution. You should try to provide a solution. But it's that human touch that matters the most."
Satisfaction Means Better Business
The purpose of call centres should extend to understanding and empathy if they want to generate true customer satisfaction. For Van Zyl and his team, customer satisfaction is crucial.
"Customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal. This is one of the reasons why we send surveys to customers, understanding what they experienced, learning from that, and making changes or doing things differently."
This approach is very much by design. Acer knows you can test and retest products, yet the ultimate proving ground is when a device sits in customers' hands. When that device misbehaves or breaks, a brand owes it to customers to be responsive.
It also owes it to itself. Support calls are a rich vein of customer insights and business intelligence. Companies such as Acer incorporate the feedback from these channels to improve their offerings.
Support calls can even influence product design. Unlike many other support centres, Acer does not keep its support departments at arm's length. They are a crucial part of its strategy and feedback channels.
"We strive to know exactly what's happening. We don't need to go and ask the manufacturer because we are the manufacturer. It's a big business benefit."
Small Team, Big Support
Acer Africa's support centre team is small but dynamic. Operating across phone calls, emails and chat clients, they aim to answer queries within 30 seconds, blending technology and teamwork to get results. Their performance is so impressive that they handle Acer's support calls for South Africa (including all 11 official languages) and the UK.
"You as a customer don't want to wait on the call for quite some time. That just wastes your time. You want to talk to somebody as soon as possible. So, one of the things that we take pride in is that we answer more than eighty percent of our calls within 30 seconds. One of our biggest KPIs is the turn-around to speak to somebody. It's something that we really thrive on."
In many cases, agents have to choose between efficiency and empathy. Acer Africa's support centre achieves both because of its integrated and strategic value to the larger organisation. That, in turn, creates the spirit and vision its agents carry with them, ultimately resonating with customers who show appreciation by supporting the Acer brand.
It takes a lot of hard work to keep such success going. Using information from calls, surveys, and such, Acer Africa's support teams constantly look for better ways to deliver results, improve response times, and ensure their agents have all the necessary information when answering a query.
The result is a support operation that excels by global standards and covers multiple countries. The Acer Support recipe for success is straightforward: efficiency, empathy, and agent empowerment lead to customer satisfaction.
While many support desks only dream of realising these elements, Acer Africa's Support Centre cultivates and lives them every day.
"It's strategic, it's integrated as part of the business," says Van Zyl. "That's what helps us maintain our purpose here in the support centre and across Acer: satisfied customers."
Supplied by: Acer
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