Alto property CRM announces new support partner
17th August 2023
Customer support is more important than ever – with 38% of customers globally saying it has a significant impact on how much they trust a brand.
We chat to Alto’s Head of Customer Support, Matt Traish, as he shares his biggest challenges and how Alto’s new partnership with Ventrica will “greatly improve” customer and employee experience.
Tell us a bit about yourself. How and why did you get into customer support?
More by accident than by design to be honest! My first job was working part time in a shop during my college days and I found that I really enjoyed helping people.
I then worked in a number of (mostly) financial institutions and most recently was at Uswitch as Head of Contact Centre and Servicing.
What do you think are the main challenges when it comes to delivering a first-class customer experience?
There are three major ones for me:
- The ability to understand that what’s important to me might not be important to one customer, but might be vitally important to another
- Building and retaining a great team can be a challenge but it’s an essential part of providing a great customer experience
- Being really clear on priorities, but also recognising when they need to change
And what about opportunities?
The big opportunity for me and my team is to constantly evolve and never be satisfied.
The world is moving so quickly, and this provides constant opportunities for us to improve what services we’re offering and how we deliver them to our customers.
How have things changed since you started working with Alto property software?
Being relatively new to the business, the biggest change has been the move to Ventrica which is partnered with another support software we use called Zendesk.
We can see the opportunities that developing Zendesk will give us to improve the customer proposition. For example, our focus on customer data and feedback is now sharper, and we’re using this information to better identify what our customers want from Alto.
How much of a role does technology have when it comes to customer support?
It’s important – tech enables, builds data and helps us match our work to our people.
However, given the choice between great support tech and great people, I would 100% choose people, as people are what really makes support work.
And that’s the beauty of the move to Ventrica – we’ve been able to retain our support team and their many years of experience, while also giving them access to world-class technologies that only a partner like Ventrica can provide at scale.
Tell us a bit about Ventrica, why Alto chose them and what this means for customers. What changes will they see?
Ventrica is an award-winning service provider that I’ve known for many years.
We didn’t pick Ventrica because they’re the least expensive (they aren’t!), but because they have great people and are the most technically advanced.
They’ve got the ability to greatly improve our customer and employee proposition with their slick workforce management, better telephony and an excellent understanding of how great operations work.
What does the future hold for Alto customer support?
The future will see developments to how we service our customers – quicker ticket turnarounds, published service level agreements (SLAs). And there’s much more to come in the coming months.
What tips would you give estate and letting agents to get their support query resolved quickly?
First of all there’s plenty of helpful information in the dedicated Alto Help Centre. But if you need to submit a support ticket – give us as much information as possible.
A key KPI for the team is getting each ticket resolved the first-time around, so having all the information we need is hugely helpful.
Where can Alto customers keep updated on Alto support?
I’ll keep the Alto community updated on developments and service improvements every month, via messages in Alto, the Help Centre and in our monthly customer newsletter.
For product updates, visit Alto Agenda.
