Blackstar Solutions, a unified communications (UC) provider based in Bristol and Cardiff, UK, has chosen the Highlight network and application monitoring service to further improve customer retention.
Owen Hawkins, head of infrastructure at Blackstar’s HQ in Bristol says, “Keeping our customers is critical to the business, and whilst we already have an excellent retention rate, we wanted to ensure customers stay for the long term.”
“To achieve this, we needed to make it easier for our team to build and maintain strong relationships with customers, and this required proactive support. That’s why we chose Highlight – it enables us to have full visibility of how all our services are performing as well as the ability to share and use this trusted information with customers.”
Blackstar serves medium to large sized enterprises with flexible and scalable unified communication solutions including voice, video, collaboration and mobility solutions. Many of its customers have large contact centres and Blackstar delivers an end-to-end service which also covers networking, servers and the underlying infrastructure.
Owen explains his initial problems. “Our UC business is extremely active and growing fast. Through our partnerships with network aggregators such as Mitel, Gamma, and Huawei, we could only see how services were performing for customers by accessing each separate and proprietary reporting tool. This was suitable for larger customers with a big presence in multiple countries, but the reports were useless for supporting smaller companies.
“We needed a way to monitor all our customers so that we could be more responsive and proactive to their needs, specifically those with smaller WANs and LANs. The last thing we want is to be unaware of an issue until we receive a call from a customer.”
Blackstar started working with Highlight in April 2018 and as part of its commitment to customer service, the company offers basic monitoring within all its packages.
“With Highlight, we now have a single view encompassing all our customers and can identify potential issues in advance,” continues Owen. “A wallboard in the office shows us at-a-glance if anyone is having performance issues. And when visitors come to the office, we can show them that we are actively monitoring all their services. In the past, we had no way to achieve this.”
Blackstar’s sales team will also benefit says Owen, “With Highlight we are able to differentiate our offer over competitors. And if a customer needs more bandwidth it is a clear-cut sales opportunity since they can see for themselves how much they are using and what extra is required.”
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