Featured Article from SD-WAN Experts

The customer experience – it’s something companies continue to talk about in their marketing material, but few actually achieve the higher level they purport to deliver. Zappos and Southwest Airlines may the exceptions to the rule, but thousands of other brands seem to miss the connection between their marketing and the activities they carry out on a regular basis.

That doesn’t mean the death of the brand, but it does mean that there’s a lot of work to do to ensure the customer experience matches with expectations. The smart companies look to industry experts to help along the way. For CenturyLink (News - Alert), that means partnering with master agent, Telarus.

In a recent blog post by the master agent, Telarus (News - Alert) shares why it makes sense to pay attention to CenturyLink now. First, the company is the third largest telecommunications company – something to certainly brag about. Second, there have been a number of key acquisitions that have driven the company’s growth, including Tier 3 (News - Alert), Quest, Savvis and more. Third, CenturyLink has the potential to do a little bit of everything, from disaster recovery to cloud to public and so much more.

The previous focus for CenturyLink was all about telecommunications – it fit the mold; customers understood what that meant. Today, the demands for staying connected are so much more diverse, putting even more pressure on the organization to expand its reach and deliver on the customer experience in every channel. To meet that demand, CenturyLink is now an IT organization that delivers managed hosting, colocation, cloud, voice and collaboration, security, IT services, network services, UC and managed services.

As the master agent started to work with CenturyLink, it was clear that three things needed to happen: it needed to be easier, faster and better. To do so, that meant Telarus needed to step up their game, bringing together key players, bulking up the team, expanding on current offerings and adding resources to commissions. Support and response have also improved so that the marketing promises matched the customer experience.

Telarus also stepped up the game with increased training and working directly with CenturyLink to ensure seamless integration of processes and systems. Time was spent on the development of improved processes across the board to optimize engagement. Plus, Telarus is beta testing an API with CenturyLink to allow for direct access to real-time transactional pricing in GeoQuote. As a result, Telarus people are better and more capable than in the past, the team can handle it all from soup to nuts and projects are more easily sold, managed and implemented thanks to this effort.

As a result, the customer experience truly took a front row seat and a company delivered on the expectations built. Now, it’s time to sit back and watch how the competition responds.