Elevating the customer’s experience

The expectations of customer service have changed dramatically, with organisations seeking more than just problem-solving. Today, they demand strategic partnerships, tailored support, and proactive communication to help them navigate increasingly complex challenges. So how can businesses adapt to meet these rising demands and deliver true value?

In this episode of Making Connections, host Nick Layzell, Customer Success Director at Telehouse, is joined by Neal Bowman, Senior Service Operations Manager, and Melissa Heaven, Senior Customer Success Manager. Together, they explore the changing nature of customer service and how providers are rethinking their approach to meet these demands.

They also discuss Telehouse’s Customer Plus service as an example of how tailored solutions can strengthen partnerships and support evolving needs.

Visit telehouse.net for more information

Transcript

Nick Layzell: [00:00:00] Welcome back to Making Connections, Telehouse's podcast series, where we explore the challenges and the opportunities facing the IT industry today. I'm Nick Lazele, your podcast host and customer success director here at Telehouse. Joining me today are two of my colleagues, Neil Bowman, 

Neal Bowman: Thanks, Nick. I'm Neil Bowman.

Neal Bowman: I'm the Senior Service Operations Manager for Telehouse. I manage the service desk. I manage 28 individuals on a shift, rotational shift basis. Obviously we operate 24 I manage service for our customers on site. 

Nick Layzell: Fantastic. Thanks, Neil. And, Melissa Heaven. 

Melissa Heaven: Hi Nick, yeah, Melissa Heaven here, normally known as Millie to, to customers and to staff alike.

Melissa Heaven: So you might hear me being called Millie throughout this. I'm the senior customer success manager here at telehouse. I look after a portfolio of our customers, with our department here. I've been here for around, three years. 

Nick Layzell: [00:01:00] Thanks, Millie. And Neil, lovely to, be with you this morning. I think we'll personally touch on, the working relationship, between Neil and Millie, as you like to be called, I think, including how long you've worked together and how do you collaborate on a day to day basis?

Melissa Heaven: I'd like to say that our relationship is key to what we do. We work really closely. Neil, obviously I won't ruin any surprises here about what you do in your departments, but, we work really closely. Neil's team are the main communicators out to our customers. So that's really key for what we're doing.

Melissa Heaven: And obviously the involvement we have there. 

Neal Bowman: Yeah. So obviously Millie's manages a nber of large clients for us. Obviously, as Millie just said, the service desk is a key point interaction with that customer. So any interactions or incidents, events or requests that come in, obviously, we let Millie know what's going on and we respond and reply back to that customer with those interactions.

Nick Layzell: Fantastic. I think the closeness of the working relationship will be highlighted by the rest of the kind of conversation that we're going to have today. And we'll touch on some of the areas where you [00:02:00] collaborate with each other and provide that fantastic level of customer service. So in today's podcast episode, we're going to have a conversation about customer experience generally and how it's evolved over the decades, the changing customer demands and relationships with co location providers such as ourselves at Telehouse.

Nick Layzell: And at Telehouse, customer service is at the heart of everything we do. It's one of the pillars underpinning. Our business strategy, helping us guide towards achieving our company's mission and vision. Being customer focused is absolutely one of our core values. We're focused on understanding customers unique needs and delivering effective and efficient solution tailored to them.

Nick Layzell: My perspective as customer Success director is that really over the past 35 years that we've been in operation at Telehouse, customer service and their demands have changed significantly, prompting the need for a much higher level of support than maybe traditionally that we would have given or indeed that customers would have expected and the benchmarks for success have [00:03:00] shifted.

Nick Layzell: We recently surveyed some senior level decision makers and 84 percent of those identified general account management as a key success measure with their colo partners. And myself, I've been with Telehouse years, but Neil, you've been with us for a long time. If you don't mind me saying, an impressive 23 years.

Nick Layzell: How do you think generally that customer expectations have changed from the early days when you started right up until now? 

Neal Bowman: Yeah. So I think, well, customer demands have evolved from a more transactional relationship. We have the customers and they were basic requests for remote hand services. We used to complete a lot of, silo tape changes, reboots of equipment, hardware changes.

Neal Bowman: And now you see with the introduction of the cloud, So from like 2010, we're doing a lot more investigative work with, the interconnections of fiber, , interconnection. Previously, our involvement was very limited to requests and resetting equipment, as I said, with basic hardware [00:04:00] issues. 

Nick Layzell: So that evolving kind of nature of what you've done, I guess, probably follows the you mentioned the cloud, but obviously the technology changes, it might have been more a physical kind of, swap out type or some sort of status check of equipment or something like that.

Neal Bowman: Exactly , like for like replacements. So things like hard drives, line cards, we do, you know, immediate swaps for them for 40, 40 equipment and replace those pieces of equipment. 

Nick Layzell: So as I guess, technologies become more sophisticated. So is the need for your service desk to be able to respond to that more sophisticated technology and also, , I guess from a technology perspective, customers have a lot more of their infrastructure kind of automated so that manual process that manual work is maybe reduced and we're talking about the Primarily, I guess the connectivity or the more maybe in depth kind of, 

Neal Bowman: yeah, exactly.

Neal Bowman: Exactly. That's obviously with the interconnections. Now we're testing fiber networks [00:05:00] with O. T. D. R. S. O. T. L. S. Testers responding to customer requests and confirm if those services are faulty or not. If they are faulty, we can then obviously you. We can assist them with our cabling team and make sure those folks have rectified and fixed.

Neal Bowman: But we do a lot more than that. We rack and stack and we, we do a lot of customer installations for them audit requests, physical audit requests, should I say. And, it's things like just responding to Customers immediate requests and setting the expectation, making sure the case is followed through in a timely manner.

Nick Layzell: And I guess also, apart from the requests that your team handle directly, there may be other requests that come into the service desk that you have to point in the direction of other areas of the team. Maybe I don't know, a questionnaire or some kind of request for information that you wouldn't handle yourselves, but you collaborate with other areas of the business.

Nick Layzell: Yeah, exactly 

Neal Bowman: that. So like the compliance team, if a request comes in that requires a compliance request, we can send that request up to one of the members of the [00:06:00] compliance team. Also DC Ops, so the datacenter operations team, if a request comes in for, low temperatures for a certain period of time, we can request that sort of information.

Neal Bowman: And just make sure that customer request is fulfilled as expected. 

Nick Layzell: Okay, great. And I think Millie, maybe from your perspective, then there are some of these requests that come into the services now, maybe outside of the scope of Neil's team immediately. But managing your accounts or being responsible for managing some particular accounts then would lead you to become involved and I guess coordinate some of those responses for our larger customers.

Melissa Heaven: Yeah, that's right, Nick. We see ever evolving, especially in the time that I've been here, the customer demand is going up and up. We're seeing, , The request, the level of detail that customers require, the complexities of their requests, of course, working closely with Neil's team, they can support very well on immediate support requests, but anything else a bit more in depth, a bit more required.

Melissa Heaven: We've got customers, in different, If different sectors that require different levels of support, they require [00:07:00] different levels of maybe information that we would provide a standard, but maybe a little bit more of time to go over things to support them for them to understand exactly what we're doing as a business.

Melissa Heaven: It's really important. These customers, when we have these relationships, , you know, it's not just a case of it. Requiring support. And again, as a customer success manager, you are the first point of contact, but you're also just an extension of their business. 

Nick Layzell: And is that becoming more of the case?

Nick Layzell: Is that becoming more prevalent? Customers expecting Telehouse to be a partner of ours rather than maybe just a supplier kind of transactional type relationship? 

Melissa Heaven: Yeah, absolutely. We're seeing customers wanting us to understand their business, understand their needs, understand the importance of what we do.

Melissa Heaven: We can give an example here of, we've got finance sector customers. They, they've got different requirements now. It's ever growing, regulations, et cetera, that come in. We've got to be there to support those kind of demands and understand exactly what's coming. And there's part of that where we're learning from our customers.

Melissa Heaven: They help us to learn where we need to go and to support that. 

Nick Layzell: And have we surveyed [00:08:00] customers around the specific areas where they feel there's room for improvement, for example? 

Melissa Heaven: Yes, we have, Nick. We've, completed some persona research surveys which highlighted specific areas where customers feel there's room for improvement in the industry.

Melissa Heaven: 41 percent mentioned that co location providers could enhance their always on support services. 38 percent feel the industry should adopt a more future looking approach. And 28 percent called for a deeper technical knowledge from their providers. Nick. 

Nick Layzell: Okay. And you'll mentioned before that the levels of support and the levels of expectation from customers are increasing.

Nick Layzell: And I think those stats probably bear that out pretty well. , you know, particularly the deeper level of technical knowledge, of course, we can't be all things to all people. Telehouse have over 800 customers and, the variety of verticals that their businesses are in and the different types of infrastructure that they run and different requirements mean that we need to be pretty flexible, but also we can't move to an extremely deep level.

Nick Layzell: [00:09:00] It's more understanding their business and what they do, what they expect from us on a day to day basis. And do you think Telehouse has adapted to meet these kind of increasing expectations around support and partnership? 

Melissa Heaven: Oh, absolutely. As mentioned, even in the time that I've been here, the change in dynamic, the change in what we do as we mentioned already, we've got customers at the forefront of what we do.

Nick Layzell: And particularly you touched on financial services, What do we see generally from financial services customers that are driving this requirement for deeper levels of support and that strengthening kind of partnership or relationship? 

Melissa Heaven: Of course, these customers, any customers that's with us, but especially the financial customers, what they house with us is really important.

Melissa Heaven: But also mentioning the regulations and things like that and ever changing requirements they've got. So we've got our customers that. I have to meet regulations, which in turn they need our support to ensure that, we're complying with what they need. They're co locating with us for a reason.

Melissa Heaven: So they have to [00:10:00] ensure that we're doing everything we can to support those requirements. 

Nick Layzell: So someone may be relying on that. That financial services customer or member of the public might be relying on that financial services customer for access to the banking apps, for example, or something like that.

Nick Layzell: So it's, I guess it's key to understand from our perspective, a little bit more about what that customer does and how they operate what telehouse mean to their business. And that's something that I think we're starting to really accelerate now. 

Melissa Heaven: Absolutely. 

Nick Layzell: And of course, , not just financial services, but other industries, we're particularly aware of some customers in the hyperscale vertical, for example, hyperscale being a bit of a catch all, but social media companies or online shopping companies who may have operations globally and have had some particularly bad experiences or an incident at another data center.

Nick Layzell: So they will be more potentially onerous or maybe focused on a particular issue that they've experienced somewhere else that they don't want to have repeated at our [00:11:00] data centers or their other co location providers. So they're undergoing an extremely high level of diligence on us, our services, our support, to make sure that the issues that they faced in the past aren't repeated.

Nick Layzell: So it's clear that the nature of expectations has shifted. It's clear that meeting those needs requires more than just providing a reactive service, shall we say. It's about building these kind of lasting, strategic relationships with customers. And Neil, all of us I think here have seen firsthand how these relationships have evolved, and the benefits that close relationship can bring to their business.

Nick Layzell: Can you give a little bit more perspective on why you think that these long term relationships are so important? 

Neal Bowman: Yeah, the more we know about the customers operations, the better we can serve them. So a long term relationship allows us to build a deep understanding of the unique needs. Really, our customers rely on us to be more than just a service provider.

Neal Bowman: , they want us to be an extension of their own teams. They know the people [00:12:00] on our service desk by name and trust us to handle their requests with the urgency and care the business demands. Really, one key benefit of the relationship is a smoother. smoother operations. For instance, when something unexpected happens, we're already familiar with the customer's infrastructure and we can resolve the issue quickly, often before it's had a real time impact.

Neal Bowman: And that kind of trust and proactive support doesn't happen overnight. It's built over a long period of time. So 

Nick Layzell: that's really interesting now. And it's always a surprise to me to remember that, the customers. Touched on earlier. We've got over 800 customers. They know some of the service desk engineers by name.

Nick Layzell: That's phenomenal. And is that because those engineers longevity, the amount of time they've been at telehouse, or is it just the frequency that the customer interacts with them? 

Neal Bowman: Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. As I said, I've been at telehouse for 23 years, but then a lot of my colleagues on the service desk, they've been there a long time.

Neal Bowman: So our customers get to know the team on a name to name basis. There's that interaction with the customer, but a friendly interaction. Yeah, I [00:13:00] think, if we know the customer better, we can support them. 

Nick Layzell: That really underlines this partnership and being an extension of their team, doesn't it?

Nick Layzell: I think that's a great example. , we try in customer success at Telehouse to focus on that, being part of the customer's team, not just a supplier that deals with something when it goes wrong. But those personal relationships really, I think, cement. the ability for us to be able to work together with them.

Nick Layzell: That's fantastic. And of course, a big part of maintaining our strong partnerships is to make sure that we're continually improving the customer experience. We've been working on that for a long time. But, Neil, can you talk a little bit about how we measure that customer experience. Of course, we think we're delivering a good experience, but how do we measure that if we are actually meeting the customer's expectations or, in fact, exceeding them?

Nick Layzell: Of course. 

Neal Bowman: Yeah, sure. , so we recently installed something called customer thermometer on the back end off our CRM. Customer thermometers, a real time feedback tool that allows us to capture custom satisfaction that every interaction within [00:14:00] our service desk. So immediately insights on performance.

Neal Bowman: Instead of relying on annual surveys, we do an annual NPS survey every year that goes out to customers for feedback loops, if you like. It might take months to respond to, so obviously that all comes in and I know somebody sits down there and they go through all the feedback and it's shared with the company.

Nick Layzell: Millie, I think, you were super passionate about bringing the customer thermometer. I know from a personal perspective that you were quite keen to get me to support the implementation of customer thermometer. So, from from your perspective, of course, it's a reflection, I think, on on how, the customer's perception of the service desk particularly.

Nick Layzell: But what was your angle on implementing the customer thermometer? 

Melissa Heaven: So as Neil's already touched on, we would survey our customers once a year. And of course, as. Customer plus and customer success. We look after a handful of customers and we know how they're feeling and how their feedback is.

Melissa Heaven: We can't manage and we can't, we had no way of measuring how our other customers are, 700 odd customers [00:15:00] were feeling or what we were doing right, what we weren't doing so well or what we could improve on. And then immediately as we touched on our working relationship, mine and Neil's, we worked really closely and it was, , Really early on in the relationship, wasn't it, that we came up with this idea.

Melissa Heaven: I've had experience of the customer thermometer at a previous company. And the tool is so valuable as Neil's already touched on. It's a feedback loop. You get immediate responses. It helps us to identify what we're doing well, as I said, anything that we could change, process, whatever it may be. So yeah, really, as you've touched on really passionate, I wanted to bring this, it's all about customer experience, right?

Melissa Heaven: Our customers, our business. 

Nick Layzell: Fantastic. And I think, of course, it's okay measuring something. It's always okay measuring something. But what do we do, actually, on the back of that? Have we implemented any process or any steps that help us respond to that customer feedback? 

Neal Bowman: Yeah. So obviously, when we implemented a customer thermometer, we needed to make sure that we could respond.

Neal Bowman: If it was a negative feedback, we needed to make sure we could respond to that customer immediately and make sure that [00:16:00] customer's cared for. So there is process in place to sit there to help my team manage that. So as soon as we do get a negative piece of feedback and it's not negative, all feedbacks, valuable feedback.

Neal Bowman: So we need to make sure we take care of that customer. So there's an immediate response. It's then investigated, and then we respond to the customer. We can then take that feedback and make sure we implement change. So look, you know, improvements in what we're doing. If it's a Millie just touched on.

Neal Bowman: If it's a process change, we can make sure we make that process change and implement it and then feed that back to the customer. So we're giving them a feedback loop as well. 

Nick Layzell: I was going to say that kind of makes it a complete feedback loop. It's so important to have that process behind it where we Act on any feedback and also know that we act equally on the positive feedback.

Nick Layzell: I think that's been a really insightful and an interesting, successful. 

Neal Bowman: Yeah, no. So I needed to make sure that all that feedback, good feedback we're getting, and it's been fantastic since we've implemented it. We're getting all this great feedback, and I want to make sure the team who are managing All that [00:17:00] process again, that feedback.

Neal Bowman: So we've set leaderboards up. So all the gold clicks, all the positive feedback, it goes into a leaderboard and we know we've made it like a game changer. So it encourages and motivates the team to reach out to customers and give, give them a great service. Because that's what the end of the day, that's what we're looking at doing and improving the service we're offering to our customers.

Nick Layzell: Emily, I think, we've seen some of the accounts that you look after have been, have also been very passionate about actually, Giving the feedback in the customer thermometer. Maybe some examples of customer feedback that we've received and how we've used that maybe in the business.

Melissa Heaven: Yeah, I think it goes, as you said, it goes without say when we receive the positive feedback, we make sure that's shared with the individuals. We've got Tata, for instance, are a very passionate customer of ours. They really enjoy the relationship we've got from a customer success point of view, but they also absolutely give credit where credit's due to the service desk with any support or anything else like that.

Melissa Heaven: For example, the response we've done on a ticket, how quick that was responded to how easy it was to deal with individuals. So the individuals [00:18:00] highlighted and exactly what. What was carried out was highlighted. So yeah we're seeing that and, we get visibility of that. We get visibility of all feedback shared with us, not just our CSM customers.

Nick Layzell: And I think it's a real motivator for the wider business, isn't it? I know that we report this feedback at an executive level within the business, and it's a really good way of sharing that. Success in the service that we provide and also, motivating other teams to support the function that ultimately delivers the service that Neil's team provides.

Melissa Heaven: Yeah, we weren't sure exactly what the feedback was necessarily going to be. As we said, we have an annual NPS and we've got an understanding that we do all the work. But again, that's an annual NPS. It just depends how that customer felt in that moment. So since we launched this, what we've we're now 12 months in Neil, the NPS score that we get just from the customer thermometer that's measured on there and the happiness factor.

Melissa Heaven: It's. over industry standard. It's sky high. 

Neal Bowman: It's unbelievable. It really is. 

Melissa Heaven: I think we're at 98 percent for the NPS and the happiness factor is, one point off. It's incredible. 

Nick Layzell: Fantastic work guys. Fantastic. [00:19:00] So a goal has always been to move from being just a vendor to becoming the strategic partner.

Nick Layzell: It's something that I've really tried to, embed within our team and of course within the telehouse business, but also, aligning ourselves with Customer's operations. , really, I know that it's something that you've worked hard to do since you've been in the team embedding the work that we do is CSM and, working with other teams such as Neil's into becoming more collaborative with the customer.

Nick Layzell: How do you see the role of this relationship building in the overall success of telehouse? Relationship building is important. 

Melissa Heaven: Yes, absolutely. Relationship building and strategic partnerships are at the core of Telehouse's customer experience. Being customer centric is one of our strategic pillars, and it's the reason we chose to launch our Customer Plus.

Melissa Heaven: It's a premi, two tier concierge service that we've decided to launch for our customers, designed to offer customers enhanced, highly personalized support, and it's managing their operational relationships with Telehouse. The service, which has already been [00:20:00] delivered to 40 of our customers, that we look after currently in the Customer Success team.

Melissa Heaven: is now being formalized as we look to expand its reach over the years. Customer requests as we've already touched on throughout this, and I'm sure we will do throughout the rest of this recording have become more complex, which is exactly why we've developed. The service is to address growing demands for a high level of support.

Nick Layzell: As part of the customer plus service, I think we've implemented a nber of features of that. Obviously a customer plus customer. Someone who takes the customer plus service, of course, receives a dedicated customer success manager, , who serves as their key point of contact. And I think we should differentiate here.

Nick Layzell: Of course, Neil's team in terms of issues, operational issues, , any request for service, hits the service desk first but the customer success manager, , Is there in the background, they're on copy, maintaining that kind of key point of contact for maintaining the relationship with the customer.

Melissa Heaven: Yeah. As mentioned, of course, it goes back to the relationship that we have, myself and Neil, they are always going to be the first point of contact for [00:21:00] elements like that. So immediate support, et cetera. As you mentioned there, Nick, we are always in copy, but that's to be in copy with anything, any correspondence that we're having with these customers from any department within the business, our job is to have that full 360 view of everything that's going on with the customer.

Melissa Heaven: Okay. 

Nick Layzell: And the customer plus service itself. Obviously, I think you mentioned that it's a two tier service. We offer a gold and platin level of service, and this accommodates a wide range of customer needs. For example, the gold service includes regular service reviews, detailed reporting, coordination of meetings, initiation of Business review meetings, that kind of thing.

Nick Layzell: Platin actually offers a little bit of a higher, maybe more in depth service. And that'll be suitable for some customers and not others. But we include a unlimited kind of coordination of audits, which are a big thing now, you know, customer demands and you touched on for financial services, customers being heavily regulated.

Nick Layzell: We're finding that a lot of customers, the demands for audits are increasing. They need to [00:22:00] demonstrate to their businesses, regulators, and their customers at Telehouse who underpin their ICT infrastructure are running things exactly as they require. 

Melissa Heaven: Ultimately we're normally a high profile supplier for any of these customers.

Melissa Heaven: As mentioned, their co location services are with us. Their services may be running from Telehouse, but we house them, we look after them. We have to ensure we keep the lights on, and we keep everything running as it is. 

Nick Layzell: And Neil, , we touched on, I think right at the beginning we were talking about the integration between the service desk, and Millie's team, the customer success team.

Nick Layzell: We mentioned it being reactive. A lot of what we do as Telehouse can be reactive. So we're taking calls from customers if they've got an issue or a query. But what about proactivity now? Is that meeting these customer demands and their expectation of us as a partner more than maybe before? 

Neal Bowman: Yeah, so obviously the service desk, we interact with the customer success teams as well, but we try to be proactive in our communications to our customers.

Neal Bowman: So things like maintenance, security updates or on site updates. We try to [00:23:00] notify customers well in advance, give them enough notice. issues taking place, or maybe it's a planned event that's taking place. We don't take a one size fits all approach. Each of our customer plus customers has, they have unique and specific demands.

Neal Bowman: So we have to take that into consideration when what we communicate as a business. Our goal is to prevent issues from impacting our customers operations at the end of the day. So that's the true value of the partnership we offer, including the peace of mind that we're always working in the background to keep everything running smoothly.

Nick Layzell: And I guess there are significant differences between what customers expect. It's not a standard thing, I think. And it makes, I'm guessing really that it makes the importance of that collaboration even stronger because what might suit one customer or what might suit another customer, what they might require from us may differ so widely.

Melissa Heaven: Yeah, as mentioned, our job to be that extension of that business is to understand that business. As Neil said, one size doesn't fill. We have to [00:24:00] understand what's important, what might affect businesses, the level of communication a customer might need, the level of detail a customer might need. But of course, that changes depending on the customer's requirements.

Melissa Heaven: It's the collaborative effort between the internal teams are invaluable. So again, I know we're focusing today on the close, strong relationship that we have from a service operations. But that, that spans across all our different departments. So we're looking with our operations teams, our project teams, our engineering teams, and everything else that builds up what Telia House is made of.

Melissa Heaven: We need to understand if there is anything that's going to impact a customer. We have to understand what the impact might be. And one impact to one customer may be no impact to someone else. 

Nick Layzell: So some customers may be more sensitive about a particular thing happening or not. I know that, , you know, even when, for example, we're developing some of the campus, we're building a new administration building in the campus, and I know that maybe some customer might be a little bit concerned about the dust from that construction work, or another [00:25:00] customer might be more concerned about the noise.

Nick Layzell: Or potentially vibration. So these are very subtle differences that the customers may be interested in. And I think we can only achieve the satisfaction. We can only give that support and service that the customer needs. If we really understand and have a, I have a very close dialogue with those customers.

Nick Layzell: Millie, have you got any specific examples from a customer success point of view? I think you touched on one of our key customers earlier, Tata Communications. I know that they weren't under the customer success kind of management structure before, and we had conversations with them, I think, shortly after you joined, and Discuss the merits of them having a dedicated customer success managers.

Nick Layzell: Maybe you could just touch on a few of the things that you think have changed since Tata were under the CSM pulled. 

Melissa Heaven: Yeah, absolutely. For instance, it's been highlighted by customers, especially as we've just mentioned from Glenn from Tata, having a direct point of [00:26:00] contact to streamline processes for them.

Melissa Heaven: It's making, making everything easy to resolve issues like cable replacements within hours instead of weeks. Now it may be again, without the feedback loops or understanding or speaking to those customers. You don't know customers suffer in silence sometimes, and you don't understand that something might be an issue and how simple something might be to resolve.

Melissa Heaven: So it's, , understanding what is important to that business and helping put in process in place, having something that's quite bespoke to them. As we said, one size doesn't fit all. We're there to help, proactively understanding tosses needs is help. Upgrade their data room facilities and improving the work environment, making their daily operations more efficient.

Melissa Heaven: And then through events hosted by telehouse. So this is another unique thing that we do. We offer with customer plus our customer plus customers are fortunate enough to, we arrange for networking events. We do a regular scheduled breakfast. Now Tata really values those. They get an opportunity to now network with our other customers.

Melissa Heaven: There's been times where there's connections are made. between carriers or other customers that we have here with [00:27:00] telehouse or even meeting people by, they've been dealing with for years on email and they've met them face to face. It's things like that. So we're not only making connections ourselves with those customers, but we're enabling them to make connections across campus.

Nick Layzell: I think it's great really. And, the feedback we've had from a customer like that as a really underlined that we're moving in the right direction here, their business has benefited. We've benefited from having a closer relationship and I think it's probably made the communication and the partnership with them much stronger.

Nick Layzell: So I think, in, in, in kind of smary or in conclusion, , I think if we look back, Telehouse started obviously in 1989 as a business and customers in 1990, over the 35 years that they've been providing co location services in London, it'd be true to say from the things that Neil has mentioned that the requirements and the relationship that we have with customers and the levels of customer service have dramatically evolved over that time.

Nick Layzell: And it's interesting for me to understand that. There were probably [00:28:00] personal relationships back then, but those personal relationships or, the relationships between, for example, the service desk team members and customers operations staff. We've evolved to the point where the customer has complete confidence in what we're doing from a customer service perspective, from a service operations perspective, and this has helped.

Nick Layzell: And this is really developed through the start or since the start of the customer success service that we have at Tallyhouse. For me, it's really interesting to see that customers now expect us To be an extension of their business rather than a supplier vendor relationship. And I think also formalizing the service, moving into formalizing the service such as customer plus service that we now offer to customers has helped us define more some of the service elements that a customer maybe has always had.

Nick Layzell: Actually but are now enhanced and are now easy for customer to recognize should they want to take out our gold or platin customer plus service. So I think, , [00:29:00] you know, we'd encourage all of our existing telehouse customers to get in touch via our website or generally with telehouse. And of course.

Nick Layzell: They can contact the service desk, always available 24 seven. , to, to understand a bit more about the benefits of the customer plaster, have a consultation with one of our team perhaps and understand what they can achieve or how their business can benefit from the, golden platin service.

Nick Layzell: Thanks so much for both of you joining me today on the podcast. Thank you, 

Neal Bowman: Nick, for being part of the conversation. 

Melissa Heaven: Yeah. Thank you, Nick, for the invitation to be part of this. 

Nick Layzell: Thanks everyone for listening to this episode of the Making Connections podcast. And I hope you'll join us for the next episode soon.