The world seems to be moving more and more towards a place where companies decide that they want to effectively eliminate human interaction.  When was the last time you called a company phone number, and a real person answered the line?

 

My current default reaction to hearing a robotic or AI generated voice is now to start pounding the Zero key on my phone, hoping it will get through to a real person. The fact that a website like GetHuman exists for the sole purpose of telling people how to navigate phone mazes, I think it is clear that this problem is widespread and is only getting worse.

Don’t get me wrong – I completely get why businesses do this. Having real people answer your phones is expensive! Even in the security and access control field, this is becoming the standard. I’m not going to call out any partners, but sometimes it’s downright hard to get to a real person who can help you.

But phone systems are a terrible experience for customers.

Because we don’t like them ourselves, we have made the conscious decision to never use an automated phone system at Telaeris.

During business hours (and sometimes beyond) our phones are answered by real people. And not just a service, but rather an employee that knows our products and people. People that call in are routed to the right internal person, be it sales, support, engineering, or management.

Answering the phone is a little thing, but it is a symbol of the value we place on serving our customers and partners.

Good service is hard, especially with a product like ours. With our XPressEntry product, we have customers asking for help with our handheld hardware, weird and wonderful badge formats, new government credentials, handheld software, server software, database setup, networking items and more than 40 different access control systems.

But it is clear why we put all this effort into support when we get email and notes from security integration partners like this one:

“Last thing, I just wanted to throw this out to you and Telaeris as a whole. You all are an amazing group of individuals to work with, you have gone above and beyond with your support, responsiveness, and knowledge. Thank you and your team for being one of the best, if not the best, vendor I have worked with.”

Do we always get it right the first time?  Absolutely not!  And sometimes, not even the second time…..there are real hard problems out there!  But, if you ask our system integration partners, our OEM partners, and most importantly, their end customers, we always work like the dickens to get to the root of problems and to make things work right.

We continue to grow and improve how we can best serve our clients. We now have three international teams that can support customers in any of the 40+ countries, during their daytime.

There are also lots of systems that we build behind the scenes to try and make things easier for our customers. We continue to customize and improve our RMA, helpdesk and delivery systems, to make communications more reliable as well as to ensure customer issues are handled in a timely manner. We have many videos of integrating XPressEntry with our PAC OEM systems. We are building a library of video content of how to do common tasks with XPressEntry.

We are even building an language learning module (LLM) AI to be able to automatically answer both simple and complex questions about XPressEntry. The goal is to have this on a webpage that we hope will allow both clients and our internal support team to quickly find and answer information without even having the need to speak to an engineer.

But if you would prefer to speak to a real person to ask your question, just give us a call at 858-627-9700.

There’ll be a real person waiting for you on the other end of the line.